Monday night and Tuesday morning I wrote a column for the CSM reflecting on the state of South Africa’s democracy, ten years after that historic first democratic election they had in April 1994. Of course, they had their third democratic election on Wednesday. My column is in Thursday’s paper. Tell me what you think.
Personally, I think I left out one important point, which is just the sheer human dignity factor of being recognized as a full citizen with all the rights and responsibilities pertaining thereto. I guess I was sort of taking that for granted. But I shouldn’t have.
Two women from Baghdad
Iran, the deal-maker?
Lots of bits of news about the Iranian Foreign Ministry being involved in various quiet diplomatic interventions to try to negotiate some kind of a de-escalation in at least the Shi-ite areas of Iraq. The Americans are still denying this fiormly. But the Brits seem to have been involved in it.
An Iranian diplomatic initiative was just what I predicted (okay, mainly to myself) when I read that sermon that Rafsanjani gave last Friday.
The latest wrinkle, as reported by AP from Teheran at 00:25 EDT, was this:
- Iran ended talks with the United States over how to restore order in Iraq after concluding the negotiations were “going nowhere,” Iran’s foreign minister said Wednesday in a rare acknowledgment of official talks between Tehran and Washington.
But an Iranian diplomat reportedly traveled to Iraq to meet with members of the U.S.-appointed Governing Council and Iraqi clerics to discuss ways of ending the violence…
Let’s hope one or another of the diplomatic interventions now underway can set the situation on the way to a lasting de-escalation.
The present situation is disastrous for everyone concerned. Worst, by far, of course, for the Iraqis, who are losing hundreds of dead and having their country’s structure further degraded by the fighting. But also, terrible for Americans. We know that the number of military people killed is 87 or more so far this month. (Then, there are the mercenaries. How should we count them?)
In addition, Reuters reported on a presentation CSIS’s Anthony Cordesman gave earlier today, in which he said that the U.S. would have to approve a “massive” new spending bill of an estimated $70 billion within the next four months–and approve big new funding for next year, too, to meet its obligations in Iraq. This would be in addition to the $166.5 billion already approved over the past two years, to support war and “post-” war operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
CSIS hasn’t posted the transcript of that whole panel discussion on their website yet. But I imagine they will when they can. You can hear it in audio, already.
The timing of it!
I cannot believe George W. Bush. His administration’s policy in Iraq is a bloody and dangerous shambles. Afghanistan is slipping back into anarchy. He needs every iota of support he can get from Muslims and Arabs worldwide if any of them are ever to help him survive all this. And at this very point, he suddenly decides to give away the whole store regarding the West Bank, to Ariel Sharon.
How on earth can he be so tone-deaf, cretinous, or just plain traitorous to the worldwide interests of the U.S. people?
Well, the fact that Elliott Abrams is the main advisor whispering into his ear on matters Israeli-Palestinian doubtless has a lot to do with it.
Here’s the deal Sharon got. He pulls his troops and a few thousand Israeli settlers out of Gaza. (Sometime. Maybe.) Okay, it’s not in Israel’s interests to have the troops there at all, getting constantly sucked into the Gaza quagmire. And the vast majority of Israelis don’t give a hoot about the settlements there.
He makes a big show of “dismantling” something like four “settlement outposts” in the West Bank. Well, we’ve seen him go through that charade before. The outposts just get put up the next day; or, they move a few yards one way or the other.
And in return for these amazing “concessions” he gets unprecedented bennies from the President of the most powerful state in the world! He gets Bush’s agreement to the following three key points, as stated in Bush’s letter to him today:
(1) “The United States understands that after Israel withdraws from Gaza and/or parts of the West Bank, and pending agreements on other arrangements, existing arrangements regarding control of airspace, territorial waters, and land passages of the West Bank and Gaza will continue.”
- So, no real attributes of sovereignty at all for whatever “entity” takes over Gaza… It gets fewer powers even than Soputh-Africa’s ill-fated Bantustans. ~HC
(2)”The United States is strongly committed to Israel’s security and well-being as a Jewish state. It seems clear that an agreed, just, fair, and realistic framework for a solution to the Palestinian refugee issue as part of any final status agreement will need to be found through the establishment of a Palestinian state, and the settling of Palestinian refugees there, rather than in Israel.”
Bush and ‘civilization’
Ah, you’re saying, why is Helena wittering on about the Golden Dunce’s Cap when there have been so many other important things going on? Well okay, be patient, I’ll get to them. I actually do have a life as well as this strange thing, a blogging presence.
It was so weird, yesterday, watching that painfully third-rate performance by Mr. Deer in the Headlights trying to sound as though he was, y’know, in command of all this information about that country halfway ’round the world that has suddenly turned out to be so, well, pesky and just downright confusin’, if you know what I mean.
The Prez did not start out well. A grammatical error in the first sentence; a mis-speak in the second. Then he got a bit of a grip. For a while. Though it all sounded very canned and noticeably stilted. In the Q&A, his main instructions to himself seem to have been to filibuster (=to waste time saying nothing). So he got into these lengthy and very confused riffs on this ‘n’ that, floundering around and repeating things he’d already said in the main presentation.
(Did you gather I didn’t think he did well at all? Also, though, I thought several of the press corps’s questions were decided softballs; and only journo even attempted to ask a ‘follow-up’ question after getting the non-answer that nearly all of them got.)
What stayed with me, though, in addition to his notable non-answers on all the things that really matter, was the broad conceptual design of his presentation. The U.S. had to “stay the course” in Iraq, he was telling us, mainly because it was “civilization” itself that was under attack there. Oh, he never actually said “Judeo-Christian civilization”, though you sense he’d have loved to. He did mention that it was “Christians” and “Jews” who were getting targeted by the fores of civilization– conveniently leaving out that it is non-extremist Muslims who have borne the main brunt of the extremists’ anger so far. At one point, he did, thank God, spell out that it was not all Muslims who were “the enemy”, but only that usual “small fringe”, or whatever.
Bremer’s two original sins
On the ‘Comments’ board to my Monday night post about which US government deserves JWN’s Golden Dunce’s Cap for culpable misdoing, astute commenter Shirin made a fairly good case that both Bremer and Ricardo Sanchez were strong contenders…
In thinking about her response, I concluded that nearly all of the mistakes, tragedies, and just sheer bloody chaos that Iraq has seen over the past year and until this day can be traced back to two major, and majorly mistaken, decisions Bremer took as soon as his hand-crafted desert boots hits the ground in Baghdad. He:
(1) disbanded the army without a fare-thee-well, putting 400,000 breadwinners with military training out onto the streets, and
(2) set about dismantling the national economy in the name of ‘privatization’, economic ‘liberalization’, and a number of other neocon/neoliberal fads.
So yes, Shirin, he has to be right up there as a contender.
On the other hand, I really don’t believe those were his decisions. Whose were they? That person, I think, is the one who truly deserves the Golden Dunce’s Cap.
Rafsanjani’s victory stomp
… Okay, well maybe it’s not quite that. But the old fox certainly sounded pretty darn’ pleased with himself and the general situation in the sermon he gave in Teheran last Friday.
Okay, I have a problem here. I have the text of his sermon, that came to me via an impeccable source, but without an actual WWW link. I have no reason to suppose the following is fallacious or faked in any way. It’s attributed to BBC Monitoring in Caversham, UK (which is sited just half a mile from the boarding school I went to when I was but a girl, but that’s a different story). But I can’t find this text in the public-domain web. If someone can get me a link, that wd be great…
So anyway, this below is part of the text of the sermon that former Iranian President and present Iranian eminence grise Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani reportedly gave in Teheran last Friday, according to the Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Tehran, in Persian, as translated and trasncribed by BBC Monitoring.
The whole sermon is an intricately constructed argument, divided into a description of the 13 goals the US was pursuing in Iraq, followed by a description of 34 issues that they face there today.
It was the 18th of the 34 issues that really caught my eye:
Contest for the dunce’s cap
After thinking more about the topic of this post, from yesterday, I’ve been trying to think which individual in the Bush administration has been most culpably detrimental to the common good.
Should I choose Paul (Jerry) Bremer, for example? I note that when he was “given” the Iraq proconsulship last May, he was hailed in some quarters as some kind of a wonder-worker.
For example, the Prez himself, when announcing the appointment, called Bremer “a man of enormous experience” and “a can-do type person.” The president said Bremer “goes with the full blessings of this administration, and the full confidence of all of us … that he can get the job done.”
It was noted by some at that time that Bremer didn’t actually know very much about the Middle East (!) But Vince Cannistraro, former CIA director of counterterrorism, was quoted in this USA Today article as saying that, “His lack of knowledge about Iraq might actually help him… ” (!)
Or, moving right along here in our nominations process, we might nominate… Ricardo Sanchez, Jean Abizaid, Paul Wolfowitz, Don Rumsfeld, or… you guessed it… the big enchilada himself!
Actually, I’m thinking maybe the JWN Golden Dunce’s Cap belongs on no other head than W’s. Not just for that quote about Bremer, above. Not just for the idiotic things he keeps mouthing to the global media these days like a person who has zero clue about what’s going on– in Iraq (“the situation in Iraq has improved”), anywhere else in the world, or here in the United States.
Oh well. Tomorrow evening we get to see him do his very best to pretend he’s in charge, during the press conference. Will that performance just merely confirm the decision I am close to making, to give him my prestigious award?
History lesson, anyone?
Maybe you were not among the longtime JWN readers who read this lesson from history when I posted it here in March 2003?
Anyway, here below, on much the same theme is a literary excerpt that came my way recently, thanks to an old friend connected with the U.S. uniformed military… [I haven’t had time to check the exact citation, but I’ll take this person’s word for it, for old times’ sake.]
- The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, nsincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and MAY SOON BE TOO INFLAMED FOR ANY ORDINARY CURE. WE ARE TODAY NOT TOO FAR FROM A DISASTER…
…We said we went to Mesopotamia to defeat Turkey. We said we stayed to deliver the Arabs from the oppression of the Turkish Government and to make available for the world its resources of corn and oil…Our government is worse than the old Turkish system…We have killed fourteen thousand Arabs in this rising this summer…We cannot hope to maintain such an average…We are told the object of the rising was political, we are not told what the local people want…
Colonel Wilson fails to control Mesopotamia’s three million people with ninety thousand troops…we have not reached the limit of our military commitments…where is the balance to come from? Meanwhile, our unfortunate troops…under harsh conditions of climate and suppy, are policing an immense area, paying dearly every day in lives for the willfully wrong policy of the civil administration in Baghdad.
Attribution? T.E. Lawrence writing about the British experience in Iraq, in [my old employer] the Sunday Times of London, August 27, 1920
How they made ‘the perfect storm’
“It has been the perfect storm.” This was just one of many fine quotes in this extremely long retrospective of the past 12 days’ events in today’s WaPo, bylined to Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Anthony–yay! he got the Pulitzer he deserved!–Shadid.
The WaPo had extraordinarily comprehensive news coverage from Iraq and Washington today. (Sorry I didn’t post anything here earlier, but I needed a break.)
The Chandra/Shadid piece was the best of the fine bunch, imho. It was actually one of those big compilation articles, bylined to those two heroes but with additional reporting coming from other good reports elsewhere in Iraq, and in DC.
I was reading it very carefully to try to get a handle on how exactly all those disastrous decision got made eight or nine days ago: primarily, the decision to launch a big, bed retal raid against Fallujah at the same time they were upping the ante against Moqtada al-Sadr.
On such issues, I wanted to figure out, does Bremer report to Sanchez, or Sanchez to Bremer? Or, do they both report separately to Abizaid? Or, do they both report directly to Wolfie’s office and leave Abizaid to handle the (not inconsiderable) task of managing the military logistics?
Who was it exactly, who cooked up ‘the perfect storm’? (Btw, that quote was attributed in the article to an unnamed “official with the occupation authority.”)