Over the holidays, I added some of my faves from my April 2003 JWN posts to the Golden Oldies listed on the “Main” page of the blog.
April was quite a month, and I had (imho) some pretty good posts then. So check out the Golden Oldies section– it’s near-ish the bottom of the right-hand side-bar on the “Main” page.
(I meant to do May as well. Didn’t have time yet.)
Iraq’s anti-democratic SOFA
Wright and Chandrasekaran, writing in today’s WaPo, have a piece that outlines Colin’s Powell’s plans for the six-month transition to (the appearance of) Iraqi self-rule.
The plans include an inappropriately early deadline for conclusion of a “Status of Forces Agreement” (SOFA). Hence the headline here.
(The WaPo story uses yet more from Robin Wright’s Dec. 29 interview with Powell… Truly, a gift that has gone on giving, for many days, for the WaPo editors. Plus, today they are actually finally posting the transcript of the whole interview…. So why didn’t they do that right away for the the rest of us poor slobs instead of parceling out the goodies over five days, huh?)
Anyway, the highlights of this timetable for a highly flawed “transition”:
- Feb. 28: deadline for “agreement”–presumably between the Coalition provisional Authority and its near-puppets of the “Iraqi Governing Council”– on the content of “Transitional Administrative Law”. The TAL will basically set the rules for the Rube-Goldberg-style non-election process that will bring into being the “Iraqi Successor Government” that takes over nominal power in the country on or before June 30…
Mar. 31: deadline for agreement on the “Status of Forces Agreement” (SOFA) that will govern the continued presence of US troops in Iraq subsequent to the Rube Goldberg process…
June 30: after completion of the Rube Goldberg process, the “handover” of power to the non-elected body takes place…
What is notable about this timetable? Two main things:
Z. Schiff dubious of disengagement talk
My old friend Ze’ev Svhiff, the crusty doyen of the Israeli defense correspondents, has an interesting column in Ha’Aretz today in which he seems to be expressing considerable doubts about the effectiveness or perhaps the probability of any unilateral disengegament from parts of the occupied territories, such as has been talked about by Sharon and people close to him in recent week.
Schiff, who is extremely close to numerous current and former high-ups in the IDF General Staff, writes:
- Since Sharon delivered his speech in Herzliya two weeks ago, the IDF has not received even fragments of orders, and the prime minister’s intention remains vague… . So the decision in the army is to wait and do nothing, not even preliminary staff work. Another internal decision is that in any event the IDF must not be involved in recommendations or decisions about which settlements to move or to evacuate.
He also reports that, despite this latter decision, “In the meantime … the chief of staff, Lieutenant General Moshe Ya’alon, has taken a step of his own by stating that the evacuation of the settlement of Netzarim, in the Gaza Strip, will be a prize to terrorism.”
Powell plans Saigon-style embassy for Baghdad
The WaPo has spent just about all the past week milking the interview that Colin Powell gave them a few days ago for dribs and drabs of new information. (I guess that’s what you do on a “holiday” news week.)
So today’s drib was served up by Robin Wright in a piece titled “U.S. has big plans for legation in Iraq.”
Oops. Make that “embassy”.
Actually, in a direct quotoid used from the Powell massage-a-thon, Powell is reported as himself being a bit fuzzy as whether the new “thing” actually will be an embassy:
- “The real challenge for the new embassy, so to speak, or the new presence will be helping the Iraqi people get ready for their full elections and full constitution the following year,” Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said in an interview this week.
So let’s just go ahead and call it a Legation, okay? As in Vietnam in the days of Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American”: “After dinner I sat and waited for Pyle in my room over the rue Catinat; he had said, ‘I’ll be with you at latest by ten,’ and when midnight struck I couldn’t stay quiet any longer and went down the street… Of course, I told myself, he might have been detained for some reason at the American Legation…”
Continue reading “Powell plans Saigon-style embassy for Baghdad”
‘Cold Mountain’: Teague as Ashcroft
Just saw the movie of ‘Cold Mountain’. Wept many buckets. Therefore a good movie…
I say that in spite of scenes of gross, unnecessarily large-scale violence in the first 30 minutes that, what’s worse, were accompanied by truly terrible and “theatrical” music. Made me long for “Saving Private Ryan”, where the violence was stomach-churning but much more effective because it was NOT all grand-standish and orchestrated like some grisly version of a Cecil B. De Mille masterpiece.
In fact, since I’d been writing about real violence all day I couldn’t take it, and shielded my eyes from pollution by the cinematic version until Lorna could tell me it was okay to look again. After that, the movie went from strength to strength.
True, I did find it an interesting moral challenge to have the director draw us into the bucolic lifestyle and internal social goings-on of that strongly pro-Confederate community at the beginning. (Like setting a similar kind of movie inside Bavaria in the later days of Nazism, perhaps?)
Golan– the human dimension
The Sharon government has been hinting that, in the absence of any credible peace diplomacy toward the Palestinians, it might be prepared to resume the long-stalled talks with Syria.
What else is new? The tactic of “threatening” to turn away from one track of the so-called “peace process” (a.k.a. the peace-free process: all process and none of the peace) is an old, old one for Israeli leaders of both major parties.
And then, just as those hints about possible talks with Syria start going around, the Sharon government announces a massive new settlement-building project on the Golan.
Again, so what else is new?
If I seem slightly jaded by all these extremely repetitive shenanigans it’s because back in December 1999 I published a (pretty good) book about the Israeli-Syrian peace negotiations of the 1990s– and yes, I really do feel that I’ve seen all of this before.
The book, by the way, builds heavily on interviews I conducted with decisionmakers and analysts in Israel, Syria, and the United States. So it provides a pretty rounded picture that I don’t think is available anyplace else. Check it out!
The two sides actually did come pretty close to nailing down a very multi-dimensional peace agreement during “crash” talks they held under US auspices at the Wye Plantation, in early 1996…
Palestinian Christmas creche–the photo
In this December 24 post I wrote a bit about how, when I saw how “Christmas” was being widely represented in beijing, it forced me to think more about my own relationship with the Christmas story and Christian belief in general.
I also wrote about the lovely, hand-embroidered set of Christmas figures the Director of the (Palestinian) East Jerusalem YWCA gave our family many years ago. (Hey, it was good post. I hope you read it!)
But I also promised to try to take some pics of the Christmas figures. Here is a picture of the whole creche scene. Mary, Joseph, and babe in the middle. At the left, 3 shepherds in front, 3 Wise Men behind. On the right, 4 Wise Women. Yay for the YWCA!!!
The original photo was by expert photographer and spouse extraordinaire, Bill. (Thanks!) I did a bit of color re-balancing (?) Then I thought it would be good to make the pics come as Popup Images rather than Embedded Images. Do readers have a preference?
Cooking therapy–it works!
Happy New Year everyone!!!
I was feeling a bit in turmoil about something yesterday. So, since my daughter Lorna gave me a great Lebanese cookbook for Christmas, I checked out the recipe for “Fatayer bi-sabanekh” (Spinach pastries) and set to work.
I’d never made ’em before. But the work was just what I needed! It takes a yeast-leavened dough. Thwack, thwack, thwack, as I knead it down onto the kitchen counter. Then you have to chop the spinach, parsley and onions fine. Shir, shir, shir, as I rock the mezzaluna from side to side across the chopping board…. Oh, then the fun of assembly began.
Fun, well, yes; but it’s also incredibly fiddly. The dough’s risen already. You thwack it down again, then roll it out to 1/8-inch thick. (That’s thin.) You cut out 4-inch rounds. Then you put a small pat of the spinach-with-lemon-etc mix into the middle of each round, and crimp the edges up into a sealed triangular little dumpling. (Actually, in addition to the taste–one which I’ve savored for 33 years now, ever since my first visit to Lebanon–I really love the elegant geometry of these pastries. Picture below– I hope.)
Iranian VP’s interesting new blog
I’ve been having Iran on my mind. Thinking of “survivors” of the terrible earth-quake in Bam who have lost so much– sometimes ALL the other members of their families as well as their homes, their community… Let’s hope not their faith in whatever it is that at times like this can make a person’s life worth hanging onto.
(I have always been very moved by the parts in Victor Frankl’s book Mankind’s Search for Meaning where he writes about his time in the Nazi death camps; and how it was the people there who, despite everything, were able to keep or create some structure of meaning in their lives who were the ones with the most resilience to survive… It’s a great book.)
Anyway: Iran. I’ve just learned about, and visited, a great new blog being written in English, Arabic, and Farsi by Iranian Vice-President Mohammad Ali Abtahi.
The blog’s called “Webnevesht”. It has a really engaging tone. (MAA used to be a journalist: maybe that has something to do with it?)
In the blog, he writes mainly about politics, culture, and religion. The best page to start at is this one, which is like a “Main Index” page for the blog. (Would he do better to get hold of a Movable Type system, I wonder?)
The two posts he has about Bam are really moving. In this one, he writes a poem. It could use a bit of polishing on the translation– but even the way it is it’s achingly bittersweet and poignant.
This post is also really poignant. (I’m a sucker for the narratives of war veterans.)
ICTY: Reconciliation, or its opposite?
With about 95% of the votes counted in Sunday’s election in Serbia, the BBC is reporting that, “the SRS [Serbian Radical] party and the Socialist Party of Serbia, both headed by men facing war crimes charges at the UN tribunal in The Hague, were on track to get 103 seats – of a total of 250.”
The two defendants in question are the SRS’s Vojislav Seselj and the Socialist Party’s Slobodan Milosevic.
Earlier today (Monday) the SRS, which won 81 of those seats, offered to form a coalition with the party which came second in the polls, the Democratic Party of Serbia (53 seats), which is more reformist than the two very hardline parties. But like Milosevic and Seselj, Democratic Party leader Vojislav Kostunica is extremely critical of the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY)…
It’ll be interesting to see what happens. Some excellent background on the complex interactions between ICTY and internal political developments in Serbia can be found in a good article by Tim Judah, “The fog of justice”, in the latest issue (January 15, 2004) of The New York Review of Books.