Community resilience to natural disasters

I’ve been filled with sadness reading about the effects of hurricane damage in Haiti. Some 700 people are now known to have died there in the floods and mudslides brought on by the most recent hurricanes, and a further 1,000 are missing and–I imagine–very likely also dead.
The BBC website has this info about the deadly effects of the flooding there. The flooding and mudslides were exacerbated by widespread deforestation in the country; and the casualties were magnified by the failure of the authorities to set in motion any effective evacuation of people from at-risk areas…
Those Haitians who have survived so far still face terrible circumstances. According to that piece on the BBC site:

    The UN World Food Programme (WFP) estimates 175,000 people are without food, water and electricity and in need of help.
    “The floodwaters were so strong in Gonaives that they have washed away the whole town,” WFP Country Director Guy Gauvreau told BBC News Online.
    …Severed road links and a tense security situation are hampering efforts.
    The WFP said aid trucks carrying emergency food supplies had been lined up to form a makeshift bridge over the water.

But then, by contrast, there’s Cuba…

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Dehumanization alerts, Iraq

One way that people prepare themselves–and any onlookers–for their own use of violence against other people is by calling the intended victims by names designed to dehumanize and marginalize them, thus making it more “okay”–or even laudable–to kill them.
Most recently we saw how the men of violence beheading Americans in Iraq referred to Americans as “dogs”. And from the American side, meanwhile, I’ve recently been seeing a number of instances where US field commanders refer to whole communities of Iraqis as “cancers” (that have to be cut out by violence.)
It happened again in this piece by Rajiv Chandrasekaran on the front page of today’s WaPo:

    “Fallujah has become a cancer,” declared [Marine Capt. Jeff] Stevenson, echoing a metaphor used by several senior U.S. commanders in Iraq.

And later on, this additional dehumanizing metaphor, again used for Fallujah:

    “We need to take out that rat’s nest,” said one senior Marine officer in Fallujah, who spoke on condition of anonymity because his views contradict those of his commanders. “The longer we wait, the stronger they get.”

The “cancer” analogy is one I’ve definitely heard before–from Israeli Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon, speaking in August 2002 about Palestinian nationalists.
One notable thing about all these dehumanizing metaphors–as with the term “inyenzi” (cockroaches) that Hutu-power extremists used, to refer to Tutsis in the run-up to the genocide in Rwanda–is that in all these cases, it is actually a virtuous or at least a “hygienic” act to “clear out” and exterminate the said objects and rid the world of them. (And yes, this is the view that many Arabs have of dogs, too.)
I have a suggestion. How about everyone involved in what is essentially a politically struggle for control–whether in Iraq or Palestine– moves towards not dehumanizing their enemies in this way, but gets back to referring to them simply as “my opponent”, or “a person whom I deeply disagree with”, or whatever? Metaphors of “unclean objects” are usually designed to break the bonds of shared humanity that link each person on this earth to each other, and to make it “okay” for one person to “wipe out” another…
Actually, have you noticed the extent to which homecleaning/hygienic metaphors have already become absorbed into the discourse of modern warfare? I just wrote, “wipe out”… Then, there are “mopping up” operations, some of which, alas, may lead to “ethnic cleansing”… So you can just see what referring to people as “rats”, or “cockroaches”, or “dogs”, or “cancers” can lead to…

Britons regaining senses??

This, from Reuters:

    Most Britons want Prime Minister Tony Blair to set a date for the withdrawal of British troops from Iraq, according to a poll for the Guardian newspaper on Tuesday.
    Seven out of 10 of those polled by ICM said Blair should set a deadline for a pullout of the 8,500 British soldiers in Iraq.
    By contrast, an ICM-Guardian poll in May found 45 percent of voters believed British troops should remain in Iraq “for as long as necessary.”

In March 2003, I wrote this JWN post: The Brits should know better. All I can say is it took them a long time to come to their senses…
Still, Sept. 21 is the International Day of Peace. Happy Peace Day everyone!! Shalom, salam, paix, mir, paz, amahoro! This current phase of US craziness will, I am sure, come to an end some day!

What happened in Tall Afar

The WaPo‘s Steve Fainaru, embedded with some US military in northern Iraq, has a telling story deep in today’s paper that recreates some of the details of the battle in which, just last week, US forces recaptured control of the Iraqi city of Tall Afar (popn. 250,000-plus) from the “insurgents” who had previously controlled it.
Like this: he tells us that during the battle, US forces turned off basic services, including water and electricity for “at least three days”.
An action like that constitutes a clear collective punishment of the city’s people and is quite possibly a war crime.
I can tell you from my own experience in war-time Beirut, most people can survive a cutoff of electricity, somehow, for some time. But a cutoff of water kills people. Especially as existing supplies become increasingly degraded and disease-ridden.
In Fainaru’s latest piece, we can also learn this startling fact: Of the 600 members of the “new” Iraqi police force who were deployed in the city at the start of the battle, 517 either deserted or defected to the insurgents. Plus: “The Iraqis who switched sides included the police chief and his deputy, both of whom were detained by U.S. forces.”
Right underneath Fainaru’s piece, there on p.A32, there’s a small box in which Robin Wright cites puppet-PM Allawi as saying the insurgents are fighting a “last stand” in his country, and “We are winning.”
H’mmm.
Actually, Fainaru’s piece is full of little vignettes and snippets that indicate the shocking degree to which–18 long months into the US war against Iraq–the US military still lack much basic understanding of the political/social context in which they are fighting….

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3 Mid-Atlantic appearances this week

Some JWN readers have asked me to post info about my upcoming speaking engagements. Sorry about the short notice, but if you live in the Mid-Atlantic region of the US, here’s what I’m doing in the next few days. Do come if you can– and tell your friends!
Monday, Sept. 20, Philadelphia: 7 – 9 p.m. I’ll be participating in a panel discussion on “Pacifism in the age of terrorism” at the historic Arch Street Meeting House, located at Arch and 4th.
This is the kick-off for a two-day celebration of the International Day of Peace that’s being organized by the Earlham School of Religion, a Quaker seminary headquartered in the midwest. Appearing during the next day of the celebration will be Nobel Peace Laureate Betty Williams.
Tuesday, Sept. 21, Washington DC: Noon – 1 p.m. I’m participating in an event to help launch our Quaker book on the Palestinian-Israeli issue, at the Middle East Institute, 1761 N St, NW. Jim Matlack, another of the book’s co-authors, and I will describe the book, read some short excerpts, and answer questions. There’ll be copies for sale afterwards.
I’m sorry that the relevant link on MEI’s website doesn’t work. But if you have questions call their Programs and Events Dept at 202-785-1141 ext. 202…. and
Wednesday, Sept. 22, Charlottesville VA: 5:30 – 7 p.m. I’ll be doing another event related to the Quaker book. This one is co-sponsored by the C’ville Center for Peace and Justice and New Dominion Bookshop and will be held at N.D. Bookshop at 404 E. Main St. on the Downtown Mall.
Light refreshments will be served, and copies of the book will be available.

Life under occupation

To get a glimpse of how tough life is in a country under foreign military occupation, do read Faiza’s blog today.
One exciting prospect: her son Khalid posted there that he, Faiza, and another of her sons, Raed, are all planning to come to the US to do a speaking tour. They’re looking for sponsorship. If you’re interested, contact Khalid.
But Faiza’s main post there is so poignant and powerful. The version up today is in English. I urge you to read it.
Long story short. Faiza decided a while back to try to create a really good social-affairs project–namely to market products made by poor Iraqis. So she got involved with a locally-based women’s NGO. In this post, she and other members of the NGO are invited to a meeting with a visiting potnential donor. It’s inside the Green Zone! Full of trepidation, she goes to it…
Read her account of what it felt like entering the Green Zone, and what happened there…

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Escalations and excuses in Iraq

Regarding the development Sunday when US helicopters opened fire on (mainly or wholly civilian?) Iraqis in Baghdad, killing or injuring many of them, today Reuters’ Ed Cropley from Baghdad filed this:

    The U.S. military defended on Wednesday two helicopter pilots who fired seven rockets into a crowd of Iraqis in Baghdad this week, saying they had come under “well-aimed ground fire” and responded in self-defence.
    Initially, the military had said they opened fire on Sunday to destroy a crippled U.S. armoured vehicle to prevent looting.
    At least five people including a television journalist were killed in the incident… in central Baghdad’s Haifa Street, a bastion for anti-American insurgents.
    Colonel Jim McConville, head of the U.S. First Cavalry Division’s aviation brigade, said two helicopters armed with heavy machineguns and a total of 21 rockets had swooped over the burning vehicle and the crowd of Iraqis.
    “While he (the lead pilot) was overflying the target he received well-aimed ground fire so close that he could hear it over his intercom system,” McConville told a news conference…

One of those killed was Al-Arabiyya producer Mazen Tomeizi, who was filiming the scene around the crippled vehicle when the first of the seven rockets struck behind him.
Cropley writes:

    Reuters cameraman Seif Fouad was wounded in one of the subsequent rocket strikes.
    Witnesses in Haifa Street dispute the U.S. military’s version of events, saying they saw no one firing at the helicopters before the aerial attack.
    Fouad’s footage of the crowd around the Bradley in the moments before the helicopter strike also showed no evidence any one in the crowd around the vehicle was armed or firing.
    The footage shows a crowd of men and teenage boys milling around the vehicle, as Tomeizi speaks in the foreground. The journalist is then cut down and his blood spatters on the lens…

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Iraq on fire

The Bushites, who dominate every single rung on the ladder of violence-escalation in Iraq, have recently been systematically choosing escalation over de-escalation… And escalation is what they have got. Only a small portion of this news is even getting heard in the US.
We heard a little about the incident on Haifa Street in Baghdad on Sunday, when Iraqis crowded jubilantly around a burning US Bradley Fighting Vehicle and then were strafed by US helicopters shooting down at them from the sky. Many Iraqi civilians were killed, and many more injured. One of the injured was Salam’s friend Ghaith, who went to the scene as a photog to get some pix. Salam urges us to go look at some of the pix Ghaith was able to shoot, anyway, regardless of his injuries.
If you go that gallery of Getty Images photos, you can scroll down for more and more great images, and click on each one for an enlargement.
More violence? Today AP is reporting that a car-bomb exploded near a Baghdad police station, killing at least 59 people. Also:

    Saboteurs blew up a junction where multiple oil pipelines cross the Tigris River in northern Iraq on Tuesday, setting off a chain reaction in power generation systems that left the entire country without power, officials said.

It goes without saying that in this escalation of violence in Iraq as in all others, nearly all the pain and harm is inflicted on Iraqis–and disproportionately on Iraqi civilians.
A proportion of this violence is inflicted by the Americans and their allies, and a proportion by the anti-US forces. Since the means of killing at the disposal of the Americans are so much more powerful and lethal than those at the disposal of the “insurgents”, it is almost certainly the case that a large majority of the harm suffered by civilians has been inflicted by the Americans. (Najaf; Falluja; Tel Afar; etc, etc.)
What is quite clear is that as the dominant (even if not monopolistic) military power in the country, the US has an unequalled capability to set the tone, and to ratchet down the level of violence. And indeed, since it is still the “occupying power” under international law, the US has a fixed responsibility to do this…

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What me? Pollyanna?

Several people have accused me of being unrealistically Pollyanna-ish in even suggesting–as I did when I wrote my column in last Thursday’s CSM— that this US administration might be interested in working toward a timely, free, and fair election Iraq… In this post, I’ll give my quick defense of that column. In a subsequent post I want to start looking at what seems to be emerging as the “Negroponte Doctrine” in Iraq, and what that mean for the country.
Okay, my defense of having written the column. My friend Jim, for example, wrote me quite laconically:”Good article. The advice is not likely to be taken, as you well know.
I wrote back to him:

    Yes, I know that because they’ve never taken my advice before! However, I do think it’s important to carry on making these arguments in public to help educate the public and to lay down clear markers along the path of this so-far tragic history. Then maybe in 20 years, after untold thousands more have been killed in and as a result of Iraq, historians can dig back thru the record and say, “well it still could have been possible to do things peacefully even as late as [Sept. 2004; or whenever]”
    I think it’s also important to just keep on and on demonstrating that there are ALWAYS alternatives to the use of violence.

(In retrospect, I should have started off that reply by saying, “Yes, I ‘know ‘ that,” since I don’t actually know it with 100% certainty, at all…)
I would add to the above that I think it’s really never helpful to set off on a discussion–even if it’s with someone whose actions you deeply disagree with–by assuming that that person is inherently “bad”, or has some kind of evil or sinister motives. It’s much productive to assume (and hope) that the person is acting from what she or he considers to be the highest and most excellent of motivations, and to pursue the discussion from there.
The Bushies say they want to bring the blessings of true democracy to Iraq. Well, at one level, it doesn’t even matter whether we believe them on that, or not. But their declarations to that effect do in themselves provide an excellent starting-point for the discussion on: “Okay, if you really want democracy, what might that mean in terms of some behavior change from sides including your own? How can everyone work toward the necessary de-escalation?”
In addition, I believe that profound transformations of human character and human behavior are indeed possible. They happen every day. So I continue to live in hope that what I write might contribute to a good kind of trasnformation, however small.
My working assumption here is that by writing in the Christian Science Monitor I am able to speak to a non-trivial portion of the U.S. political elite–both those inside and those outside the reigning administration. hey, the only time I’ve ever been inside the White House, there was the CSM, folded on a side-table. And I know my pieces have frequently been included in the Pentagon’s dailu news digest service…
If I am in a position to have that discussion with people in the US political elite, then why should I waste it by impugning the motives of the folks I’m able to talk to (and can hope, however minimally, to persuade), or by calling them names?
Also, I honestly don’t see myself as an intellectually wispy, unrealistic “Pollyanna” figure, at all…

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Post-9/11 wisdom and Danny Pipes’ Dad

Bullying, ideological neo-con Daniel Pipes has a father at whose ultra- (but more traditionally) conservative knee he grew up. Richard Pipes was an ultra-conservative historian of Russian history at Harvard who was extremely influential during the Reagan years. Richard Pipes was always extremely hawkish on Cold War issues…
And now, he’s being accused of seeking to “rewards” terrorists… This, because on Thursday he published an op-ed in the NYT titled “Give the Chechens a Land of Their Own”.
After making a very appropriate reference to the scale and extremely atrocious nature of the Chechen separatists’ recent terrorist action in Beslan, North Ossetia, Pipes Sr. wrote:

    In his post-Beslan speech, Mr. Putin all but linked the attack to global Islam… But the fact is, the Chechen cause and that of Al Qaeda are quite different, and demand very different approaches in combating them.
    Terrorism is a means to an end: it can be employed for limited ends as well as for unlimited destructiveness. The terrorists who blew up the train station in Madrid just before the Spanish election this year had a specific goal in mind: to compel the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq. The Chechen case is, in some respects, analogous. A small group of Muslim people, the Chechens have been battling their Russian conquerors for centuries.
    … Because Chechnya, unlike the Ukraine or Georgia, had never enjoyed the status of a nominally independent republic under the Communists, the Chechens were denied the right to secede from the Russian Federation after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And so they eventually resorted to terrorism for the limited objective of independence.

I was amazed, indeed delighted, when I read Pipes’s op-ed on Thursday. He was quite right to seek to take on the whole insidious, anti-political discourse of “terrorism” in the way that he calmly did there… Terrorism is a means to an end: it can be employed for limited ends as well as for unlimited destructiveness.
This is an argument that many of us on the anti-war side have been trying to make ever since 9/11. The problem with the whole discourse of “terrorism” is that term gets used indiscriminately to describe, basically, any violent act of which we disapprove.
(Remember when Nelson Mandela and the ANC were routinely denounced as “terrorists” by the apartheid government in S. Africa, which built up a whole globe-circling campaign aimed at marginalizing and combating the ANC? Until, that is, they decided to try negotiating with them. At which point, they found the ANC to be very effective negotiating partners… )
And so it still is today. Indeed, Prez Bush’s johnny-one-note stress on the “Global War on Terrorism” has drowned out nearly all the essentially political aspects of what the US government needs to be doing in the world in a chorus of “You’re either with us in the GWOT, or you’re against us!” And meanwhile, the whole rhetoric of the GWOT has provided a boon and a comfort to dictators everywhere–include Putin in that– who simply by murmuring the accusation that their opponents are “terrorists” have been able to win continued strong support from Washington in all their attempts to suppress them.
So today, the NYT carried three letters from people excoriating Pipes for what he wrote…

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