The ‘threat that dare not speak its name’

Alert JWN readers will recall that I wrote here just a couple weeks ago about ambitious Charlottesville hometown boy Phil Zelikow, who’s the Exec Director of the 9/11 Commission. (And also, most probably the subject of at least one string of its enquiries, since he was a leading member of the national-security portion of the Bush transition team.) Altogether a very well-connected guy…
So it should have been no small beer, back on September 10, 2002, when he told a hometown audience in Charlottesville:

    Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I’ll tell you what I think the real threat (is) and actually has been since 1990 — it’s the threat against Israel…
    And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don’t care deeply about that threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.

I wish I could have been the one to break that story! But I wasn’t. It was Inter-Press Service’s Emad Mekay who broke it March 29. See e.g. here.
Now, in a sense, this is not “news”, because it’s been easy enough to triangulate all along that with this particular bunch of neo-cons running the DoD, the attention paid to Israel’s needs would evidently be disproportionate. But hearing it from someone as very well connected as Zelikow–as he expressed it at a one-year-after-9-11 forum at U.Va. Law School–somehow gives this theory a lot more impact.
If I were working more wholeheartedly on this story, I’d love to do a follow-up interview with Zelikow now, that is, one year after this disastrous war against Iraq that was still, back in September 2002, just a twinkle in Wolfie and Doug Feith’s respective eyes. (Okay, maybe quite a bit more than that by then… )
But I have this book on Africa to write. Shoot. Still, maybe Mekay or someone else will be following it up.

Beware, language twisters at work

The Bushies have distorted and twisted the meaning of so many of the words of our fine English language that it might seem irrational of me to take note of one particularly irritating distortion I saw–and not for the first time!–in today’s WaPo.
It’s in a piece by Thomas Ricks on a hot tip that his idol, General Petraeus, will shortly be named to head back to Iraq to oversee the organization of all the “Iraqified” security forces there after this strange self-immolatory event the Coalition is planning for June 30.
Self-immolatory? Well, not quite… Ricks quotes Deputy Secretary of “Defense” Paul Wolfowitz as saying:

    There’s not going to be any difference in our military posture on July 1st from what it is on June 30th, except that we will be there then at the invitation of a sovereign Iraqi government, which I am quite sure will want us to stay there until…

Excuse me? What is the meaning of the word “sovereign” in that sentence? I can understand what its function is, there and in a hundred similar sentences. But in the context of this sentence it is particularly clear that this function depends totally on a 180-degree twisting of the real, commonly understood meaning of the word.

Remembering Rwanda: ‘Frontline’, and my interview

Bill and I watched the ‘Frontline’ special on Rwanda last night. It was beautifully done, in general, and gave much cause for continued reflection and thought.
One of the really constructive things they did was to highlight and explore the absolutely heroic role played by a small number of individuals during the genocide. It was a pity that all the featured heroes except one were non-Rwandans, since I know that many Rwandan nationals– Hutus and Tutsis–also made extremely heroic, life-saving decisions during the genocide; and always, at literally existential risk to themselves. I want to write more about this later.
But still, the Frontline program was mainly about the reaction of outsiders to what happened in Rwanda; and from that perspective, showing so concretely that there were outsiders who did make a difference for the better through simple acts of huge courage and grace just sets in even greater contrast the cowardice of people like President Bill Clinton, national security advisor Tony Lake, and even, I would say, the resposnible people at the UN: then-sec-gen Boutros Boutros-Ghali and then-head of peacekeeping Kofi Annan.
Among the real heroes highlighted were:

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Contractors in Iraq: the convergence

This use by the U.S. military of private U.S. contractors for security duty in Iraq is something fairly new and very unsettling in international affairs and international law.
I mean, how weird is it that Paul Bremer, who’s the top representative of the U.S. military’s top civil-affairs unit, gets protected by contract soldiers, not by the U.S. military itself?
What is the status of all these guys under the Geneva Conventions? They are not acting directly in the military chain of command.
Does that make them “unlawful combatants”, I wonder? Or, if taken prisoner, would they be considered to be regular POWs?
Anyway, I learned from ABC News tonight that there are around 15,000 of them there in Iraq now. Many more fighters than even the Brits have in Iraq!
The more I thought about it, the more the whole set-up seems like some kind of a harmonic convergence among so many interests:
* Bombs-Away Don Rumsfeld’s interest in turning the U.S. military into a lean and mobile fighting-machine. (No time for training and maintaining large numbers of ‘boots on the ground!’)
* The Prez’s general desire to outsource everything in sight… Government jobs to non-government companies… US jobs to India and China, etc etc.
* Karl Rove’s desire to keep the number of ‘actual’ U.S. forces who are recorded as casualties as low as possible between now and November 4… and

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Iraq: an administrator’s-eye view

I realize that there are many massive political developments underway in Iraq. I don’t have time right now to say anything new or interesting about them. But I just wanted to make note of the following little sub-set of the story…
There’s a slightly dank-looking blog out there in the blogosphere called Deeds. It’s written by someone using the pseudonym “John Galt” and describing himself as “a U.S. citizen working in the CPA in Baghdad”. If you click on the link “Who is John Galt?” you end up at a picture of a cat.
Why all this secrecy? He links prominently in his blogroll to something called Debkafile, which is an unabashedly pro-Likud website full of alleged “hot news” from the Global War on Terror… Maybe that’s a clue, right there?
Anyway, he hasn’t been posting much recently. Too busy winning the war on terror, eh, John? But cruising through his blog quickly today I found a fascinating set of contributions to his Comments board, as follows:

    John, I am here at the CPA again. I was in Al Ramadi for three weeks, which is in Al Anbar. I was helping 82nd transfer everything to the Marines. Things were okay when I arrived, but as the Marines moved in I noticed that hostilities were growing. Here are a few things that I noticed:

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Voices from Mozambique

I’ve been struggling quite a bit with (re-)shaping and (re-)writing the section on Mozambique for my current book-writing project, “Violence and its legacies”. Actually, the conference I went to on Sunday/Monday on transitional justice etc has really helped me to solve a problem in the writing.
At one point during the conference, I remarked out loud on the fact that there we all were, some 45 people, nearly all from “western” or “northern” cultural backgrounds, all earnestly discussing a bunch of problems/issues that disproportinately affect people who come from very backgrounds very different from ours.
“We need to get more people from Africa, from the ‘south’ generally into the room and the discussion here!” I said.
A little later, Maurice Eisenbruch, who’s a professor of Multicultural Health and indeed the Director of the Centre for Culture and Health at the University of New South Wales, in Australia, took my suggestion a little further… He conjectured what a Cambodian or East Timorean traditional healer might conclude if he had been a fly on the wall during our meeting thus far…
(I hadn’t met Maurice before. He was one of a number of really interesting people I met there.)
So okay, the problem I’d been confronting in my writing was mainly this: How to “shape” all the many really significant and interesting things I heard people say in Mozambique last year as I gently elicited their views on the efficacy of the peace process their country went through in 1992-94, as well os whether they might have liked to see war-crimes courts or truth commissions brought to bear on the situation then. (The answer to both those latter questions was almost always a resounding “No!”)
So I had to figue out how to shape (i.e. edit) all the interesting things I’d heard from them, for two main reasons. (1) To get the material to fit into the end of an already overcrowded chapter. And (2), so that my own analytical frame would control the narrative.
After what happened at the conference, I thought…

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Conference on Trauma and Transitional Justice

I’ve been here at the Airlie House Conference Center in Virginia at a conference on Trauma and Transitional Justice in Divided Societies since Saturday night. It has been extremely “busy”, and has dealt with many very important issues.
Sat. night we got to see a pre-premiere showing of Anne Aghion‘s great new film about Rwanda, called “In Rwanda we say… “ Apparently it, and her earlier film about Rwanda, “Gacaca”, will both be shown in the US on the Sundance Channel on, I think, April 5.
Anne was also here, and answered questions after the showing, which was really great. I’ve admired her work for a while now, so it was good to meet her.
Two of the highlights of yesterday’s very full program were presentations made by South Africans: Judge Richard Goldstone, who’d been the first prosecutor of the UN tribunals for former Yugoslavia and Rwand and a member of South Africa’s Constitutional Cour; and Paul Van Zyl, who was the Executive Secretary of the TRC in SA and now works for the NY-based International Center for Transitional Justice…
I don’t have time to recount most of the really interesting things they said. Goldstone gave some interesting background on the political-negotiation background to the formation of the TRC in SA– more, I think, than I’d heard from him when I interviewed him in Johannesburg in 2001.
The most interesting thing that Van Zyl said was that he didn’t see any necessary connection between a retelling by violence survivors of the human rights violations of the past, and personal healing. He noted that while there had been thousands of instances of that apparently having happened during the work of the TRC, there were also many instances in which the experiences that survivors had at and with the TRC had been “literally heartbreaking for them”; and he recounted a particularly poignant example of that.

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Elections, legitimacy, and the ‘international community’

I’ve been mainly immersed in matters Mozambican this week. (When I wasn’t doing other bits of work on Palestine or Rwanda…. Tenth anniversary of Rwandan genocide coming up April 7th. Great-sounding ‘Frontline’ special on that subject on April 1st. My contribution to it will be on their website, not on the broadcast.)
So anyway, back to Mozambique. I was writing about the landmark elections they had there in October 1994. Those were the country’s first-ever democratic elections. The commitment to holding them was enshrined in the General Peace Agreement that in October 1992 ended 17 years of truly devastating civil war between the Frelimo government and the Renamo insurrectionists…
There is at least one aspect of those elections that is of direct relevance to the elections hopefully to be planned soon inside Iraq– namely: the key role that the “international community” played not solely in helping to organize the elections but also, crucially, in certifying their outcome.
All of which bears out my theory that the esential “legitimacy” of a sovereign government has much to do with the ability of this government to win the recognition of its legitimacy by other governments, as well as its ability to win the “consent” of those over whom it governs. (Recognition of other beings as fully right-bearing persons also has much to do with the recognition of this status by other persons, as well. But that’s a whole different, though intriguingly parallel, line of enquiry.)
So, in Mozambique in 1994, the elections were due to be held October 27-28. But on October 25 the Renamo chief, Afonso Dhlakama suddenly went into a funk and declared that he and his people would not take part. Yikes! A similar thing had happened with the IFP, in South Africa’s elections just six months earlier–but ended up getting resolved. But in October 1992, in Angola, UNITA’s Jonas Savimbi had contested the results of the UN-sponsored elections immediately after his defeat in them had been announced; and he then reignited his insurgency against the Luanda government… And that horrifying civil war has only recently now been brought toward an end…
So in Mozambique, Dhlakama went to his home city, Beira, and holed up there, and refused to come down to the capital, Maputo.
All the diplomats who were in the country, desperately eager to see the elections work, went into a big tizzy. The South African Ambassador was the only one Dhlakama would talk to. He flew up to Beira and started talking to him. Dhlakama expressed all the complaints he had about Frelimo’s alleged misdeeds in the organization of the election…
Negotiations ensued. In the early morning of October 27, the head of the electoral commission, Brazao Mazula, announced that the two-day-long elections would go ahead as planned… Still no constructive word from Dhlakama… But the negotiations continued round the clock…

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Palestinian call for nonviolent intifada

The following is a translation from Arabic of the appeal by 70 Palestinian intellectuals and officials that appeared in the Palestinian newspaper Al-Ayyam earlier this week. The translation came from someone at the American Task Force on Palestine.
It looks like an interesting, generally well-crafted and constructive text. I’d love to see the original, however, if someone can send me a link to it, as the translation doesn’t look totally sound.
PUBLIC STATEMENT
We the undersigned, members of the of the Palestinian people from all political, intellectual and social sectors who are unified in their struggle and steadfastness, affirm our condemnation of the blatant aggression launched by Israel against our people, which was embodied two days ago with the criminal operation conducted by Sharon and his right-wing gang which resulted in the martyrdom of the leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and his struggling comrades.
We reaffirm our people’s rights, stipulated in all international covenants, and the use of all methods to defend ourselves. We are almost exploding from the pain and hurt of the disaster but despite this we call upon our people in the homeland, and in line with our national interest, to take the initiative from the hands of the criminal occupation gang and arise again in a wide ranging peaceful and popular intifadah with clear aims and sound speech wherein our people own the element of its initiative and the path it takes. This way we can make Sharon miss the opportunity of crowning his aggression against our people and sacred places by putting the final touches on his security plans.
We call upon a unified intifadah as a new step to revitalizing popular work organized with basis that have a clear program and a political revenue. We reaffirm our commitment to our just and legitimate demands of our rights and call for alignment based on national unity and unified leadership to resist the occupation.
Enough Criminal Assassination Operations
Enough Bloodshed.. Enough Occupation
The signatories:
1- Ibrahim al-Hafi
2- Ibrahim Msallam
3- Ahmad Jbara (Abul Sukkar)
4- Ahmad Hallas (Abu Maher)
5- Ahmad Fares
6- As’ad Odeh
7- Amin Maqboul
8- Buthayna al-Duqmaq
9- Jad Is’haq
10- Jamal Dar’awi

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More data on Israel’s assassinations

B’tselem’s server is up again today. If you go here, you can find the following information, which covers the period from the beginning of the current intifada (September 29, 2000) through 10 March 2004:

    At least 135 of the Palestinians killed were extrajudicially executed by Israel, 76 of them in assassinations carried out by the Israel Air Force and 59 of them in assassinations carried out by ground forces. In the course of these assasinations 90 additional Palestinians were killed, 28 of them minors. 80 of them in assassinations carried out by the Israel Air Force and 10 of them in assassinations carried out by ground forces..

So the number of “collateral” fatalities did not, as I had mistakenly written yesterday, exceed the number of those “targeted” for murder.
The number of extrajudicial killings is higher than I had estimated yesterday. Significantly, too, as you can learn if you go here, the policy was pursued under Barak and not solely under Sharon.
The first assassination that B’tselem lists there, during this intifada, was that of Hussein Muhammad Salim ‘Abayat, age 34, from Taamera, Bethlehem, who was killed by Israeli security forces helicopter missilefire aimed at his car, in Beit Sahur, on 9 November 2000. Two 52-year-old women were killed as “collateral” damage in that attack.
The word “B’tselem”, by the way, is Hebrew for “in the image”, and is a reminder that all human beings are created in the image of G-d.