I’m here in Lawrence, Kansas at a conference on the situation in Iraq one year after the “victory”. It’s always good to get out into the heartland and listen to what’s on people’s minds in the US heartland, ways outside the Washington beltway. Three weeks ago, Bill and I were in Oxford, Ohio, where he was speaking at a similar gig at Miami University.
I only got into town in time for the tail end of the session before the one I was speaking on. It seemed really interesting. There was a retired military guy who now teaches at the US Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, whom I heard voicing some interesting thoughts. I’ll tell you more about ’em later.
There was also a totaly asinine, silver-coaing type of guy from the State Dept, called Robert Silverman, who said things like “well the abuse allegations ware not our finest hour but the general trend-line is upward”, etc etc… He certainly didn’t look as though his heart was in it, though, and he slunk away from the conference soon after.
Xian, history, mass tourism
In the very center of the ancient Chinese city of Xian there is a sturdy
and imposing Bell Tower which today has traffic swirling all around it. The
base of the Bell Tower must be some 100 feet long. A little to its
northwest, there’s a slightly less high–though still impressive–Drum Tower.
On the evening that Bill and I arrived in the city, we made our way
through the dark, street-level tunnel that pierces the base of the Drum Tower.
It was May 1, and all parts of the city center were jam-packed with
revelers, so on occasion we had to almost push our way through the crowd
in the tunnel, and a couple of luckless drivers seemed quite stuck in the
midst of the pedestrian throng.
When we got emerged from the northern end of the tunnel, it was as though
we were in a different world. Nearly everywhere else in the city, the
culture seems very recognizably Chinese. The women are bareheaded,
with many of them wearing their hair in jaunty little pony tails. The
food stores and restaurants offer dumplings or noodles. All the signs
you can see are in Chinese characters. But in that neighborhood north
of the Drum Tower, the atmosphere seems much more “Central Asian”. Here–
and especially along that first long street leading out of the Drum Tower,
the main food item offered is kebabs. All the store-signs have Chinese
writing on them– but some also have some Arabic script, too. A number
of the women wear headscarves or veils. This street, here in the heart
of China, is Xian’s famous “Muslim Street”, a continuing symbol of the fact
that Xian is the city that anchors the eastern end of the trans-Asian Silk
Road.
Beijing: Summer Palace and Bei-Da
I’m back home in Virginia. I have two further “China travelogue”
posts I want to write as soon as I can, but things are pretty crazy in my
life right now.
The second of these posts will be about Xian, the amazing spot in central
China that anchored the eastern end of the “Silk Road”; the place that 2200
years ago was the first capital of a unified China; and a place that is a
very important location for the absorption and transmission of both Buddhism
and Islam across the Asian land-mass…
But here’s the other China post I wanted to write:
One delightful day last week, Bill, our friend Ann Womack, and I went to visit
the Summer Palace, situated in the northwest of today’s Beijing. The
visit would only be a short one because at 2 p.m. I was scheduled to talk
to Dr. Wang Suolao’s class on Middle East politics at Beijing University,
which is near the Summer Palace. Beijing is a huge city and the traffic
situation there a multi-laned morass of congestion, so we’d planned our itinerary
to combine the two trips, which worked out well.
Breakdown of U.S. Mideast policymaking
The abuse of prisoners that has started to be revealed in the U.S. detention center in Abu Ghraib is quite disgusting to contemplate. I have tried to imagine the broader context within which those half-dozen ill-supervised soldiers committed those foul acts– and in which, moreover, they felt quite “comfortable” taking those photos so they could brag and snicker about their actions later.
Clearly, what they did was not just a “one-off”, furtive set of abusive actions; but it must have been embedded in much broader patterns of systematic abuse and an expectation of the toleration or even encouragement of it.
I have been trying to imagine the dimension of the whole iceberg of which the disgusting acts recorded on those photographs were “just” the tip.
Is this iceberg as large as a systematic structure of abuse of prisoners by U.S. forces in Iraq and elsewhere? There are growing indications–from the illegal holding center in Guantanamo Bay, whose commander had travelled to Abu Ghraib last fall to help set up the detention system there; and from Afghanistan, and elsewhere– that it is. And perhaps even larger than this?
Notes from Shanghai (and China, generally), part 2
We’ve been having an incredibly busy, informative, and fun time here in China. Just before I introduce the things I’ve been writing here so far, I want to apologize to any readers who found a rather perplexing post that was up here for a few hours, that should have gone onto a private family blog…
Anyway, here are the main things I’ve been intending to put up here.
Between Thursday April 29 and Saturday May 1 or so,
I managed to write the following notes about experiences I’d had during the
previous ten days or so:
Continue reading “Notes from Shanghai (and China, generally), part 2”
Notes from Shanghai, I
So what about China meanwhile, since I’ve now been here for five whole days…
We’ve been in Shanghai, hosted by East China Normal University, which has
a beautiful, large campus on the eastern edge of the city. We’ve been
staying in their “Academic Exchange Center”, which is also a place where
they lodge high-school principals who come there for short courses of in-service
training. (“Normal”, in the school’s name, signifies its original role
as a teacher-training institute.)
The hosting has been generous and wonderful. ECNU has made Bill an
“honorary professor”, and our friend Brantly Womack with whom we’re traveling
an “advisory professor”, so we had a short ceremony at which that happened,
on Thursday evening. Prior to that on Thursday, we all–Bill, Brantly,
his wife Ann Womack, and I–gave lectures at various parts of the unversity.
Bill and I gave ours in the Russian Studies Center, which is the core
of an international-studies center that they’re planning. I talked
about Israel/Palestine and Bill about Iraq. The audience was a group
of around two dozen faculty members and grad students. We gave our
talks in short bursts in English, and they were interpreted into Mandarin.
The discussion was good. People seemed very concerned about both
situations, and fairly well informed.
In the afternoon, I went along to Ann’s lecture…
No US de-escalation yet
Okay, it seems that the evaluation I wrote last Monday of the situation in
Fallujah and other parts of Iraq was overly optimistic– based on an overly
generous estimation of the strategic intelligence of the people running the
US occupation in Iraq.
Nothing wrong with a bit of optimism and a bit of generosity of spirit, I
reckon. Except that in this case both were misplaced and I ended up
being wrong.
How can the people making the big decisions regarding the running of the
occupation fail to see that it is totally in their interests to climb down
the ladder of escalation that they’d hoisted themselves up onto in both Fallujah
and Najaf? It is only a very short-sighted, immature strategic “thinker”
who could maintain that there would be anything to be gained over the long
haul from winning the military “victory” in Fallujah that everyone knows
in advance is–because of the US side’s access to weapons of truly massive
destructive power–quite within their power there.
So the purely military outcome of any such outcome would not be in doubt.
But if the US forces were to “win” in such a battle– a battle that
quite predictably would involve causing the deaths of tens of thousands of
Iraqis, most of them noncombatants– then what?
What would cocky little Marine Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, the head of the
1st Marines Expeditionary Force that is currently besieging Fallujah, do
the day after his forces achieved such a victory?
Climbing down in Iraq?
I’m just praying that the ceasefire reportedly agreed on for Fallujah sticks, and that it’s the harbinger of a serious US commitment to de-escalation and diplomacy in Iraq.
I think the weekend’s fighting in Qusaybeh must have come as a shock to the US commanders there. Somehow some of those “sneaky” (or should we just say well organized?) insurgents from Fallujah and Ramadi had managed to spirit themselves 150 miles to the west and launch a fairly large-scale ambush there. Despite Gen. Myers’ huffing and puffing about a possible Syrian role in it, it seems there wasn’t one– though Qusaybah is right there near the Syrian border.
In addition, the insurgents’ ability to render many vital roads unsafe– allied of course to the fact that the drivers of many of the U.S. military supply convoys aren’t members of the military and therefore can’t be forced to drive when they are scared to–means that many U.S. forward units have come close to facing shortages.
Logistics, logistics, logistics. The Brits–as I’ve mentioned before here, more than once– should have remembered that this is what can really stymie western military adventures in Iraq.
Gaza article, etc.
Finally! The Boston Review article I wrote about Gaza has been put up on their website. You can read it here.
I wrote it in late February and revised it in late March. Tell me what you think. (Some of it may not be totally “new” to attentive JWN readers… )
I’m in Ohio. Yesterday I spoke at Miami University here about Rwanda and S. Africa. Tuesday, we’re going to China for a couple weeks. Life is pretty crazy. I wish I could follow the news from Iraq more attentively– or even better, be there!– but still, I’ll be writing what I can about that and everything else during the upcoming travels.
I just saw that Israelis tried to kill Rantissi. What follies, follies, follies!! How can anyone imagine that actions like that, or the gross collective punishment imposed on Fallujah, or the gratuitous provocations against Moqtada Sadr will bring peace??
Virginia contractor; contractors revisited
One of the many things I love about Yankeedoodle’s blog is the state-by-state listing he gives of U.S. fatalities. On today’s post he has this link to a story about the shooting death Friday of Virginia Beach contract worker Steven Scott Fisher, 43.
According to that story, Fisher “was transporting oil between Fallujah and Bahgdad for Halliburton subsidiary KBR- Kellogg, Brown and Root.”
Why are private contractors hauling oil for the U.S. military? I reflected on the general phenom of the military’s massive use of contractors in this April 1 post. In that one, I pointed out that these contractors are not under any military discipline– basically, they often have carte blanche to act as they please. Who’s going to haul them into court?
The whole, disastrous Fallujah crisis was sparked off, remember, after some contractors drove through the city and got caught in an ambush.
There are other clear dangers from the use of contractors, too…
Continue reading “Virginia contractor; contractors revisited”