Urgently needed: Big shift in U.S. policies in Iraq

I’m guessing the U.S. military leadership has finally understood the scope
of the problems their people face in Iraq, and the stunning depth of the
failure of Paul (Jerry) Bremer, the man appointed by the suits in
the Pentagon to run the “political” side of the occupation?

On the ground, the military has reportedly pulled out of Sadr City–just
a mile or so from the Green Zone!– and is suing for a ceasefire in Fallujah.
Meanwhile the quasi-puppet IGC is collapsing and there are many, many
reports of U.S.-“trained” Iraqi security units defecting en masse to the
insurgents.

Evidently, a massive, top-level shift in the politics of running this
occupation is the only thing that can save the 120,000 highly over-exposed
and over-stretched American troops in Iraq from a total and humiliating disaster.

(Yes, it is already a disaster that they have killed as many Iraqis as they
have in this past week, and have lost as much political support on the ground–and
internationally–as they have. But at least, the losses of U.S. troops
are still not at this point massive.)

So, about this urgently needed shift in the politics of running the occupation
…

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US occupation of Iraq: the last act?

The director of the main hospital in Fallujah is reporting that 450 Iraqis have been killed there during this week’s fighting, and more than 1,000 wounded. If this is anywhere close to an accurate tally, then one way or another this marks the beginning of the endgame for the US occupation of Iraq.
Even if the US forces stopped operations in Fallujah and nationwide right now, these kinds of losses inflicted on the indigenous population mean that the US has lost all its credibility as the governing force in Iraq, as well as much of its ability to dictate the timing and other modalities of its by-now inevitable exit from the country.
How many people in the Bush administration have even heard of the Amritsar massacre?
The circumstances of that April 1919 atrocity, in which British forces mowed down 400 unarmed Indian protesters on a single day were, I admit, very different. But just as the Amritsar Massacre signaled the beginning of the end of the Brits’ “thousand-year Raj” in India, so too does the Fallujah Massacre of April 2004 signal the beginning of the precipitous crumbling of the US occupation of Iraq.
History moves a lot faster nowadays than it did in the early 20th century. It took the Brits a further 28 years after Amritsar to bring their colonial rule over India to an end, though after that fateful day the writing was very evidently on the wall for them.
At the rate the US military is currently going, I doubt that its presence in Iraq will last even a further 28 weeks. One way or another, the Fallujah Massacre will certainly be in every history book in every Muslim country from here on out.

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News from Cole

Great stuff, as always, over at Juan Cole’s blog today. Especially this snippet from a friend of his who managed to call a friend inside Najaf:

    The Americans are repeatedly sending in envoys to Sistani, who rejects Americans the permission to enter the city. They have now told Sistani that they are going to enter the city in four days after religious celebrations are over. Sistani has ongoing negotiations with Muqtada trying to make him leave the city…
    A lot of pilgrims from Iran are caught in this mess, sleeping in the streets, roaming streets trying to find shelter and something to eat. Pilgrimage in Najaf these days coming won

National unity, anyone?

I’m just wondering where all those people are who’ve been earnestly worrying that Iraq will collapse into sectarian civil war if the US forces should leave? (I wrote a little about that issue, here— scroll down about halfway.)
It seems to me that, by deciding to strike simultaneously against targets significant to both the Sunni and Shi-ite communities in Iraq, the US military has been doing a magnificent job of cementing a robust sense of national unity among them.
Maybe that was the plan?

Peace, war, and John Kerry

Whenever I’m in my hometown, Charlottesville, Virginia, on a Thursday I try to take part in the pro-peace “presence” that the C’ville Center for Peace and Justice maintains on a busy intersection in town for one hour during rush-hour, every week.
I was back there today with a great group of CCPJ friends. Our best sign is one that says “Honk for [peace symbol]”. It’s simple, it’s clear, and best of all it’s interactive.
Today, there was more honking and waving from passing drivers than ever. People seemed really charged up about the situation. I think there’s a convergence between the very disturbing news about the big new fighting in Iraq and the equally disturbing news coming out of the 9-11 Commission that is telling everyone that the whole move to invade and occupy Iraq was all along a big and dangerous diversion from the “real” war against terrorism.
I was just looking at the nationwide polling figures at this handy site that gathers all the recent data from the big national polling companies together in one place. A Zogby poll conducted April 1-4 found that 44% of respondents would re-elect Bush, while 51% wanted “someone new”. Bush against Kerry, however, it was 45% to 47%. So Kerry probably needs to come out and define himself more. He has seemed very tentative so far– but let’s hope that’s because he’s planning a really excellent campaign.
A Fox News poll conducted April 6-7 had Kerry ahead of Bush by a statistically insignificant hair: 44% to 43%.
Kerry, it seems to me, has to say something big and significant about the war–and soon. This time around, unlike in 1992, it is not just “the economy, stupid” that people are worried about. They are worried a lot about the economy, yes; but they’re also worried about the war and what it portends for the economy and for many other facets of American life. (Like the physical safety of close family members in Iraq, or like civil liberties at home.)
What would I advise Kerry to say?

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Friedman–marbles–loses

I had a quick read of the NYT and the WaPo today. NYT news coverage on Iraq seems ways better conceptualized and better organized than WaPo’s. The quality of NYT reporting from inside Iraq is also pretty good. And then, at the back, there’s a world-class column by Maureen Dowd:

    Maybe after high-definition TV, they’ll invent high-dudgeon TV, a product so realistic you can just lunge through the screen and shake the Bush officials when they say something maddening about 9/11 or Iraq, or when they engage in some egregious bit of character assassination…
    Even though the assumptions the Bush administration used to go to war have now proved to be astonishingly arrogant, na

Chickens–home–roost (Part 2)

After three days of fighting in Fallujah, AP reports that a Marine Lt.-Col. from the nearby military camp estimated that the Marines “now control 25 percent of Fallujah”.
That, after actions that included damaging two mosques:

    The Abdel-Aziz al-Samarrai mosque was hit by U.S. aircraft that launched a Hellfire missile at its minaret and dropped a 500-pound bomb on a wall surrounding the compound…
    During fighting elsewhere in Fallujah, U.S. forces seized a second place of prayer, the al-Muadidi mosque. A Marine climbed the minaret and fired on guerrilla gunmen, witnesses said. Insurgents fired back, hitting the minaret with rocket-propelled grenades and causing it to partially collapse, the AP reporter said.

The U.S. commanders’ decision to launch such a highly escalatory operation against Fallujah should come under strong scrutiny at home. Okay, many people in Fallujah (but actually, only a tiny proportion of the city’s people) took part in the gleeful desecration of the corpses of those killed U.S. “contract personnel” (i.e., mercenaries). It was tragic, it was inhumane, but stuff like that happens in war.
And anyway, those contractors were not part of a military chain of command. What the heck were they even doing going as fully armed foreign civilians into downtown Fallujah– a place where up to that point few military patrols ever wandered?? What kind of reckless craziness is that?

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Rwanda genocide commemoration

My column marking the tenth anniversary of the start of the Rwanda genocide is out in Thursday’s Christian Science Monitor. I reflected quite deeply before writing it, and it seems to have come out more or less as I wanted.
This afternoon (Wednesday), I spoke at a gathering an energetic, social-activist student at U.Va. law school called Heather Eastwood had organized, to commemorate the genocide. I used some of the ideas from the column, but talked at greater length about many aspects of the genocide. The crowd was larger than either Heather or I had expected. (They have exams coming up there soon.) And then, people asked some really good questions and we had a good discussion.
One of the big points I made was that the standard, familiar-to-Americans, ‘criminal-justice’ approach to dealing with the legacies of atrocities is not necessarily the best one. These were nearly all law students! And the ones who came to the talk were probably disproportionately supporters of the human rights movement’s broad global campaigns in favor of war-crimes courts for every atrocity… But still, the sheer gravity of the kinds of problems I described with that approach them seemed to strike them.
One of the last questions had to do with whether I thought the Rwandan government could have gotten both accountability and reconciliation. That gave me a welcome opportunity to explore that question more than I had until then. I noted that there is often, in practice, a trade-off between the attainment of these two goals; that attaining each of them requires a serious investment of time, resources, and attention; and often societies simply cannot attain both and therefore have to choose between them.
I talked a bit about the very different set of choices made by Mozambique in 1992… Anyway, it was a good discussion.
I note that inside Rwanda itself, President Kagamae presided over large-scale commemorative activities in which he blamed mainly the “international community” for the genocide, and identified the victims as merely “Rwandans”… This, in continued pursuit of his argument that the categories “Hutu” and “Tutsi” don’t exist any more.

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W’s Iraq debacle unfolds

Swish, swish, swish… Can you hear it? That, friends, is the sound of our president’s chickens coming home to roost in Iraq.
I know I’ve said before that I get no pleasure from seeing this terrible–and quite avoidable–tragedy unfolding there. It will mean more families in the US and in the “coalition” countries hearing that dreaded knock on the door. It will mean many more Iraqi families hearing news of the death of a loved one. It will mean more people returning to their homes broken in body and spirit. It will mean –most likely–more political and social disruption yet to come, in Iraq and in neighboring countries. More grief, more pain, more suffering to come.
And it didn’t have to be like this.
Last night, at a seder in Washington DC with some politically active (and very anti-Bush) friends, we raised our glasses to “Next year in the White House”. That, it seems to me, is the only way at this point for the people responsible for this debacle to get anything like what they deserve for their lying, their scheming, and their war-mongering.
As I think I pointed out the last time things went downhill badly in Iraq for the US forces–last November–I had foreseen so much of this happening. One of my main points of comparison is what happened to the Israelis after their quite “voluntary” attempt to launch regime-change-by-force: in Lebanon, 1982. See this portion of a JWN post written March 21, 2003 (or the whole post there, if you want to: it’s in ‘Archives’, for some technical reason.) Or this one, from May 20, 2003.
None of this is rocket science. It just takes a basic understanding of the fact that most people in the world don’t like to have their countries remade by foreign occupation armies. I don’t know why that should be so hard for some people to understand.
But now, we are where are. More and more cities in Iraq are being taken over by–their own people! USA Today scooped the biggies by reporting that “about 24,000” of the US troops who were supposed to rotate home over the next few weeks would have to stay on, instead. (Thanks to Yankeedoodle for picking that up.) The brass and the suits in the DoD are each, separately, rushing big-time to pursue a policy of CYA… And the Prez has been… playing baseball.
Hey, Dick Cheney! Isn’t it time you had someone go in there and re-program young Junior?
There is only one even half-way plausible way for our Prez to get his backside out of this mess…

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Human Rights Watch, on Israel

So many of Israel’s blindly ardent defenders in the west make the claim that Amnesty Internatinal and Human Rights Watch criticize Israel “disproportionately”. This past week, HRW executive director Ken Roth wrote a good op-ed in the Jerusalem Post in which he stoutly defended the organization’s record.
Since I’m on HRW’s Middle East Advisory Committee, I am happy to provide that link to Ken’s piece. Ah, but I just checked: they require registration. So here is the full text:

    The truth hurts
    By KENNETH ROTH
    Apr. 1, 2004
    As the UN Commission on Human Rights meets for its annual session in Geneva, one can understand why Israel feels picked on. Many commission members are abusive governments that will spend an inordinate amount of time condemning Israel while doing everything possible to protect themselves and their allies from critical scrutiny.
    It would thus be understandable if the Jerusalem Post were to criticize the commission or others who apply a similarly blatant double standard. But in recent months, the Post’s opinion pages seem fixated instead on Human Rights Watch – an organization with a long record of objectively reporting on not only Israel’s conduct but also abuses by Palestinian groups and repressive governments throughout the region and the world.
    Human Rights Watch reports are taken seriously by the press, the public, and policymakers of nearly all political persuasions, including the Israeli government. Yet it is precisely this credibility that seems so irksome to the Post’s opinion writers. At a time when Israel desperately needs a hard-nosed, honest evaluation of its human rights practices, the Post’s opinion writers seem determined to demonize those who are most capable of providing that assessment. Sadly, truth is rarely an obstacle to these attacks.

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