My “day job” these days– when I’m not posting stuff on the blog, tending my garden, or doing all the other things that can handily distract me from it– is to write up all the material I’ve been gathering over the past 42 months on “How societies deal with legacies of atrocious violence.” This will be a book, once I’ve wrestled all my material into shape.
These days I’m working on the chapters on Rwanda. Finding the best words to convey the horror of what happened during the genocide there–and especially the enthusiastic, public, and mass-participatory aspect of it– is hard enough. Finding words that work toward providing an explanation of that is even harder.
This weekend, I’m going to what looks like a really timely conference in London, Ontario, titled “Why neighbours kill”. (Note the Canadian spelling there.) They even have a website for the conference. I think I’m supposed to talk about Rwanda, with an emphasis on implications for post-genocide policies. Preventing iterations of violence/atrocity is the big concern of my book. However, as I think about the conference I’ve also been thinking about another situation of prolonged, genocidal or near-genocidal violence among neighbors with which I’m even more intimately familiar than the one in Rwanda: that is, the time I spent in Lebanon, 1974-81.
The Lebanese civil war started on April 25, 1975…
The ‘greatest generation’– and W’s lot
Even though I’m a pacifist (and some day I might tell you why), I recognize the great human qualities often exhibited by people who go to war: courage, self-discipline, a desire to make the world a better place…
Of course, those qualities can also be exhibited by pacifists. But arguing that point is not my purpose here. I just want to note that, in my view, what made the World War 2 generation the “greatest generation” as it is called was the vision and real leadership shown by the decisionmakers at that time in the crucial project of fashioning the post-war peace: qualities that are notably absent from the decisionmakers in our own sad era.
There were two key aspects of that peace-building project that I want to note: (1) how seriously the British and their Allies took it, from the very early days of the war, and (2) how it was consciously designed to be unlike the highly punitive settlement of 1919, a settlement that had brought the world only Adolph Hitler and another, even more horrifying round of global war.
How seriously they took it.
My father, James Cobban, was not a high decisionmaker. He was a 29-year-old schoolmaster in London when the British were drawn into the war. He signed up almost immediately, and was assigned to an administrative branch of the Intelligence Corps. (M.I. 1-X, to be precise.) From the days of the blitz of London, people in the Intel Corps were already laying plans for their “future” occupation of Germany. That took courage and guts. It also took vision.
A little later, my father was involved in planning beach organization for D-Day. But once that was done, back they went to planning for the occupation of Germany. No-one would have dreamed of throwing their many meticulous plans into the trashcan.
In Bernard Lewis-land meanwhile…
Responding to my recent post on Fouad Ajami, commenter John Koch asked the excellent question:
- Why pick on the humbled Ajami when, week by week, Lewis makes bold assertions and predictions, based on his presumed unsurpassed knowledge. No one challenges him or points out how his past predictions about Iraq turned out mostly wrong. Witness: Bernard Lewis Advocates War, Predicts Iraq Future (2002).
Well, I disagree with the assessment that Fouad has been “humbled” by recent events… Momentarily taken aback, perhaps.
But John’s right that at least Fouad seems to evince some general cognizance that his confident earlier predictions had not panned out. And I was interested in checking out what Bernard Lewis has been writing recently.
It was the work of a few moments to go on a visit to the strange land of fog, wilfull ignorance, and misperception inhabited by this sadly misplaced medieval (in more senses than one!) historian.
See, for example, this interview, conducted by Atlantic Monthly contributor Elizabeth Wasserman on April 15, 2004.
Well, Elizabeth was throwing him the most amazingly silly and softball questions. (“You mention that the reason that the Arab-Israeli conflict appears to be the central preoccupation in the Arab world is that it’s the only local political grievance that people can discuss freely in the open forum.” Yes, I know: it’s not even a question, as presented there….) Meanwhile, April 15: never mind that over there in Iraq things were going to hell in a handbasket for the whole US imperial adventure and for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people, eh?
So you might not want to wade through the whole, turgid transcript of Elizabeth’s interview. But if you go to almost the very end, you can read this gem:
Back to the era of coups in Iraq?
Time was, back in the 1960s, that Baghdad was plagued by successive coups d’etat. Was that another one we saw there today, with Baghdad fashion maven Paul Bremer and his pals on the IGC launching a “pre-emptive strike” on Lakhdar Brahimi’s ability to do the job that he thought had been entrusted to him, namely, taking a lead role in assembling Iraq’s new “transitional” leadership?
Sure looked like a bit of a coup to me.
Bremer and the pals may think they’ve “pulled a fast one” on Brahimi by “naming” Iyad Allawi as the interim PM. But I’m sure that by doing that they will also have conisderably complicated the present Iraq-related diplomacy at the Security Council.
Brahimi, certainly, came across fairly miffed in his reaction to the IGC’s “news”. And I’m sure that Kofi Annan and several weighty members of the security Council will be miffed, as well.
And that matters. After all, what use would it be to Allawi to be the “Prime Minister” of a government that is still considered–like the existing IGC–to be totally a creation of the US occupation forces? If he can’t be “Prime Minister” under an arrangement that includes a strong new U.N. resolution that significantly dilutes US control in Iraq, then I wonder why on earth he would consider the job to be worth having at all?
Ah well, people can be funny, I guess… Especially when there’s the scent of all those billions of dollars of US “reconstruction aid” that might be attached to the job… Certainly, in the photo accompanying the Al-Jazeera story on the topic, Allawi already looks as if he’s laughing all the way to the bank…
Most Americans reject torture
In an interview May 22 , 2004, Harvard law prof Alan Dershowitz, a one-time liberal who has become a leading apologist for the use of torture in the war against terrorism, crowed that “Americans” had come to share his point of view:
Asked if he thought Americans were ready to “do what it takes” to get information from terrorists who threaten American lives, Dershowitz [said]: “I think so. But I think Americans want us to do it smarter, want us to do it better…”
Not so fast, big guy! The American people are actually a lot smarter, or let’s say wiser*, than you give them credit for! And certainly a lot wiser than you are… A WaPo/ABC News poll published today reveals that 63 percent of Americans say they think the use of torture is “never acceptable”.
More than half, 52 percent, also say the use of “physical abuse but not torture” is never acceptable.
This whole poll has produced results that are pretty encouraging for those of us who want to persuade the US government to adopt a policy of zero tolerance for torture. Because of that, I tabulated all the results that the WaPo website gave on various different web-pages into one simple table.
You can find the table here. Feel free to use it, but a little attribution for my work in tabulating the data would be nice…
——
* For my discussion of why it is that respecting the Geneva Conventions–on banning torture as well as on other things–is not only the “right” thing to do but also the “smart” thing to do, check out this May 12 post on JWN. Especially the end part of it.
Who wants to be ‘feared’?
Well, I’m still not particularly enamoured of the lackluster John Kerry. And no, despite what it may have seemed from this recent post, I certainly don’t want to see him being pushed any further to the RIGHT.
Anyway, today I happened on this piece by Jodi Wilgoren in the NYT. It’s titled “Kerry Foreign Policy Crew Has a Clintonian Look to It”, which is an accurate description of the situation, as evidenced by what Wilgoren writes about there… Basically, the same-old-same-old: Berger, Holbrooke, Perry, Albright (yawn), with the addition of a couple of slightly younger–but oh yes, most decidely white male–faces.
Zzzzz.
We don’t need that same-old over again. We need vision. We need a true commitment to internationalism. We need… well, a whole bunch of things very different from what these tired old retreads seem to promise.
Anyway, down there in the body of this piece, my attention was drawn to this handful of sentences, describing a conversation Wilgoren must have had with that tired old veteran’s veteran in the foreign-policy analysis world, Les (“let’s split Iraq into three!”) Gelb:
Tolerating torture: the slipperiest slope
What is the main reason why we need to press President Bush to make an unequivocal
and verifiable commitment to ending the US government’s use and toleration
of torture?
Because any hint at all from the highest echelons of government that this
kind of deeply abusive behavior is ever acceptable at all is a slippery
slope down which it is all too easy for a government, its employees, and
even a supposedly democratic citizenry to slide.
We now have two prime examples of this slippery slope phenomenon:
(1) In Israel, the legislature specifically allowed for the security
services to apply “moderate physical pressure”, at first in cases where there
was good reason to suspect that a suspect had concrete informatin about a
“ticking time-bomb” just about to explode…
Oops! Down the slippery slope they went!
“Moderate physical pressure” became a use of stress positions, dousing with
cold water, and other means of inflicting pain so harsh that many survivors
have had lasting side-effects. (See, for example,
this
2002 Amnesty International report.)
As for “ticking time bombs”?
Continue reading “Tolerating torture: the slipperiest slope”
Fouad Ajami’s mea not-quite-culpa
I admit it. There is a certain delicate pleasure to be had by parsing the terms in which one-time supporters of–and even cheerleaders for–Bush’s quite optional invasion of Iraq have started to try to wriggle off the hook of their own prior positions.
I wrote here in mid-March about Michael Ignatieff’s attempt in that direction.
But at least I have a good deal of respect for most of Ignatieff’s public work and argumentation.
Today, we have the public writhings –on the New York Times Op-Ed page, no less–of a quite different fish, Fouad Ajami.
Ajami–just like Ahmad Chalabi, as it happens–is a Shi-ite Arab who left his homeland while still young and ended up in the United States as a strong supporter of Israel and a darling of the neo-cons. Beyond that, Ajami is blessed (cursed?) with a delusion that he is Joseph Conrad reincarnate, a condition that manifests itself through the generation of prose of a staggeringly self-aggrandizing, mock-heroic grandeur.
(Actually, I think Edward Said had that delusion, too. Don’t know what the cause of it is/was in either case?)
So today, here is Ajami, bloviating as follows:
So, has the torture stopped yet?
Why does it seem that no-one is asking the right question yet:
Has the U.S. government definitively stopped all use of cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment against people in U.S.-run detention facilities in Iraq and everywhere else around the world?
And then: How can we be certain that that behavior has stopped?
I’m sorry, friends, I know I wrote here about this just two days ago. But until someone can reassure me on the above two points then– given the behavior of many organs of the U.S. government over the past 30-plus months–I am going to have to assume that the torture is continuing.
Maybe not (this week) in Abu Ghraib; but quite likely, in many other places. And maybe next week, back in Abu Ghraib again…
I am going to have to assume that all the “consternation” expressed by various spokesmen for the Bush administration is consternation over the fact that the abusive behavior of U.S. government employees and contractors has been revealed, rather than over the fact of the abusive behavior itself.
No-one in the administration has yet provided any clear-cut declarations at all to the effect that, “From now on the US government and all its employers and contractors will abide completely by the Geneva Conventions and all other relevant international and domestic regulations in its treatment of the detainees under its control.”
That’s the kind of declaration I would look for, as a first step.
Instead, we’ve just had flurries of declarations to the effect that, “Our own investigations into the abuses are thorough and are continuing… The perpetrators were only a few bad apples… But you can just trust us to deal with this whole thing… ”
That is, the same kinds of avowals of good intent, coupled with thinly veiled instructions that everyone else should just butt out of enquiring into this whole business, that you hear from serial abusers in just about any situation of chronic rights abuse.
By the way, yesterday Human Rights Watch put up on their website a good summary of all the “International and U.S. Law Prohibiting Torture and Other Ill-treatment of Persons in Custody”.
Kerry-Zinni?
Let’s face it, John Kerry has NOT come out with a clear position on the all-important Iraq question. He needs a running-mate who has.
So how about Marines Gen. Anthony C. Zinni (retd.)?
Zinni’s book only came out today. No time to read it yet! But he did a really good interview with CBS yesterday. (And here are the remarks he made at the Center for Defense Information on May 12th.)
Zinni was also the one who famously, before the fact of the Bushite invasion of Iraq, warned it would turn into a “Bay of Goats”.
Yesterday, to CBS’s Steve Kroft, he said:
- And to think that we are going to ‘stay the course,’ the course is headed over Niagara Falls. I think it’s time to change course a little bit, or at least hold somebody responsible for putting you on this course. Because it’s been a failure.
The only thing I’d fault there is to say it’s time to do both: to change course and to hold the present bunch of so-called ‘policymakers’ acountable.
Exactly who, in Zinni’s view, is it that should be held accountable?
- Well, it starts with at the top. If you’re the secretary of defense and you’re responsible for that. If you’re responsible for that planning and that execution on the ground. If you’ve assumed responsibility for the other elements, non-military, non-security, political, economic, social and everything else, then you bear responsibility…
Certainly those in your ranks that foisted this strategy on us that is flawed. Certainly they ought to be gone and replaced.
[Kroft comments coyly that, “Zinni is talking about a group of policymakers within the administration known as ‘the neo-conservatives’ who saw the invasion of Iraq as a way to stabilize American interests in the region and strengthen the position of Israel.” He names as members of this group Wolfie, Feith, Richard Perle, Eliot Abrams, and ‘Scooter’ Libby, and adds: “Zinni believes they are political ideologues who have hijacked American policy in Iraq.” Zinni responds as follows…]
I think it’s the worst kept secret in Washington. That everybody – everybody I talk to in Washington has known and fully knows what their agenda was and what they were trying to do…
And one article, because I mentioned the neo-conservatives who describe themselves as neo-conservatives, I was called anti-Semitic. I mean, you know, unbelievable that that’s the kind of personal attacks that are run when you criticize a strategy and those who propose it. I certainly didn’t criticize who they were. I certainly don’t know what their ethnic religious backgrounds are. And I’m not interested.
I know what strategy they promoted. And openly. And for a number of years. And what they have convinced the president and the secretary to do. And I don’t believe there is any serious political leader, military leader, diplomat in Washington that doesn’t know where it came from.
So anyway, what state does Zinni come from? Could he balance the ticket geographically? Who knows?
But quite aside from any musing about Kerry putting him on the ticket, I think it is great that this accomplished, well-informed, and insightful person has gotten his views so well out there in the public discourse–and just before the Prez finally goes on the air tonight to “reassure” us that he has a policy on Iraq.
(As my son said: If the only thing the President has been able to say during the past four important days is that he will “shortly be making a speech designed to reassure us”– then how reassuring is that?)