Just World News with Helena Cobban – Page 344 – Info, analysis, discussion

The draft that dares not speak its name

They don’t want to call it a draft but it sure ain’t your father’s “all-volunteer military” any more…
The WaPo ran a big front-page piece today about the various stop-loss programs that have been implemented by the US armed forces. The idea is that people who have already in the past contracted to enter military duty in either the regular forces, the reserves, or the National Guard can have the termination dates of those contracts summarily postponed by the service in question if it feels a pressing need to “stop the loss” from various units.
In the piece, Lee Hockstader writes about Staff Sgt. Peter G. Costas, a Texan and an Army Reserve interrogator in an intelligence unit who was due to retire from the reserves last May. Hockstader writes:

“An enlistment contract has two parties, yet only the government is allowed to violate the contract; I am not,” said Costas, 42… He has now been told that he will be home late next June, more than a year after his contractual departure date. “Unfair. I would not say it’s a draft per se, but it’s clearly a breach of contract. I will not reenlist.”

Hockstader writes about a number of other service members who feel similarly violated by the “stop-loss” orders. He (she?) should have talked to Marine’s Girl, whose blog was the first place that I learned about this eery new phenomenon.
MG wrote about stop-loss here and here.
The second of those posts was written Dec 20, a few days after her Marine got back to the US on an unexpected leave. In it, she relayed part of an IM session she and he had just held. He was still held “captive” at that point on an un-named Marines base where he had to go through around two weeks of mandatory “counseling”. In the course of it, his “counselor” had reportedly urged him to give up any emotional entanglements he had back home…
So here’s a portion of the IM session, as posted by MG:

That thing about “refusing to continue to drag you along” was what the Counselor From Hell had urged him to say to her…
Once they were able to talk on the phone rather than merely thru cyberspace, plucky, persistent old MG was apparently able to talk a bit more loving sense into him… And later posts on her blog reported that he made it to her place by Christmas Eve and they had a grand ol’ Christmas together…
Anyway, check out the whole blog, and leave her a big hug on one of her Comments pages!
So, back for a last moment to the WaPo story, Hockstader reports that by using stop-loss orders, “the Army alone has blocked the possible retirements and departures of more than 40,000 soldiers, about 16,000 of them National Guard and reserve members who were eligible to leave the service this year. Hundreds more in the Air Force, Navy and Marines were briefly blocked from retiring or departing the military at some point this year.”
He (?she) quotes military sociologist Charles Moskos as saying that this widespread use of stop-loss orders, “reflects the fact that the military is too small, which nobody wants to admit.”
The stop-loss seems hard on ALL the service members involved. But it seems it has been used disproprotionately against members of the Guard and reserve. This places huge burdens on them and their families– especially since they usually don’t get even the same level of health benefits etc that the regular military get.
Let’s hope all these people and their families start urgently contacting their representatives in Congress. Blatantly involuntary service should be ended NOW. Bring ALL the troops home!

The planet as rickety boat

I got back home from my trip to China and California yesterday and managed to get to Quaker meeting this morning.
It was SO good to be back. Quakers frequently call Sundays, “First-day”. It takes a bit of getting used to. So two weeks ago I totally didn’t even have a first-day! It always amazes me, flying west across the Atlantic, how you can fly along through one single unbroken night and lose a whole day in there somewhere.
Last first-day, I was in California with Bill and Lorna. We’d spent the night before in SF, and then drove three hours northward to see Granny in the small town of Willits. I guess I could have gotten to a Quaker meeting if I had tried hard enough. But I’d only flown in from China the day before and I was still fairly badly jet-lagged (or jet-ragged, as my Japanese friends say, which always strikes me as even more graphic).
So today, I was determined to go. I made it to the Charlottesville Meeting’s later (11 p.m.) worship session. The moment I walked in the door of the meeting-room I had the same strong sense of warmth, of spirit-power, and of existential homecoming I had the very first time I walked into this simple, square room some seven years ago.
Our meeting room was built from scratch as an addition onto an older wood-frame house some ten years or so ago. It has a lightly pitched, scissor-joisted ceiling with two (?three) long, thin skylights in one side of it, and windows around three sides of the room that look out mainly onto trees, but also onto some houses, a school, and a packing-warehouse. We have twelve or more long, old-fashioned wood benches arranged in three concentric squares on the heathered blue carpet. The walls are white.

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Geopolitics of the Gulf 201

Ever since 1970, when the British withdrew the sizable forces they had
maintained
“East of Suez”, with the primary mission of guaranteeing the security of
the
Gulf and of its all-important oil pipelines and shipping lanes, the ”
security”
of these routes and facilities (from a western perspective) has been guaranteed through the
maintenance
of a delicate balance between the three legs of the Gulf’s security ”
stool”.
One leg–until recently–was the multi-faceted US defense relationship with Saudi Arabia.

The other two legs were (from the US point of view, still) much more problematic than the relationship with saudi Arabia, and
in need of frequent re-balancing. These were Iran’s significant strategic
“reach” over the Gulf area — heavily pro-Washington until the Shah fell
in
1978; then judged to be distinctly anti-Washington– and Iraq’s somewhat
more
meager strategic reach over the area.

(Iraq is intrinsically less
strategically
hefty than Iran– which was why Saddam was such an arrogant fool to think
he could ever win the war of choice he launched against Iran in 1980.
Plus,
Iraq has almost no direct seafront footage along the Gulf, while Iran has
hundreds and hundreds of miles of it– all the way down till it meets
Pakistan
down there in the Arabian Sea someplace.)

In all those eight years of terrible carnage that were the Iran-Iraq War
(a.k.a. the Very First Gulf War of the modern era), Washington enacted
its
“balancing role” mainly by giving discreet help to whichever side was the
momentary underdog, with the presumed aim of keeping the war going for
as long as possible.

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Aging gracefully…

I’m on a cross-US plane, traveling home to Virginia after a poignant visit with my 96-year-old
mother-in-law, who lives in a small town in northern California. Being
with Granny and seeing her struggling to deal with her daily routine put me
in mind of two other older people elsewhere in the world who are going through
their own versions of these tough struggles of age-related infirmity– but
under situations where:

they are both the nominal heads of significant polities that have no
formal provision for head-of-state retirement,
each is surrounded by a tightknit conservative coterie of men who have
an interest in keeping him at some visible level of human functioning, and
each of these coteries can be presumed to have access to all the very
latest in life-elongation technology.

I am referring to the Pope, and to Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd.

Almost as soon as I started composing the above description of the situation
these two men find themselves in I found myself feeling sorry for them. I’m
assuming, in both cases, that there’s a strong likelihood that the ruler in
question may well have passed the stage of brain/physical decay at which he
loses the ability to make his own wishes known even if they’re in defiance
of the wishes of his advisors.

In both cases, the man’s advisors
seem to evince an all-too-evident desire to keep some some minimally credible
biological simulacrum of the old ruler alive. And in both cases, the
old man’s age-related decline seems to have progressed beyond the point where
we could expect him to be able to summon the guile, the planning ability,
and the implementing ability that would be needed to effect an end run around
the advisors.

So I see both these old guys as, effectively, the captives of their advisors’
designs for the polity. Which may well not be–indeed, probably isn’t–at
all the same thing as the best interest of the aging lion himself.

Continue reading “Aging gracefully…”

China, and the ‘meanings’ of Christmas

In many of the places I went to during my recent visit to Beijing–and certainly,
throughout the whole of Incheon airport, in South Korea–I found massive,
very obtrusive manifestations of a certain view of “Christmas”. In
the Wangfujiang shopping district of Beijing there were huge inflatable Santas.
Tinsel hung from every eave.

In the lobby of our hotel, the smell of industrial-strength glue rose endlessly
from a specially constructed little Christmas “hut”, topped off with the requisite
sheets of cotton-wool “snow”. At its door, quite inexplicably, one
or sometimes two young Chinese women stood in a glamorized version of a
“Santa” outfit– red satiny mini-dress, Santa hat, black boots– doing as
far as I could tell just about nothing except stand there self-consciously
amidst the piles of pre-wrapped “Christmas presents” for hours on end. Were
they also on offer as merchandise? Who knows?

From the PA system, meanwhile, endless streams of Fa-la-la-la-la or Hark
the Herald made up just about the entire repertoire of the week’s muzak offerings.

On one of my last days there, the CNN went out from the hotel-room cable
offerings so I started flipping channels. Came on the local channel
CCTV with a 20-minute rendering in English of local and world news. Quite
well done, I thought. Afterwards, a magazine-type piece on the theme
of “the growth of Christmas observance in today’s China.”

“More and more Chinese people are learning about the spirit of Christmas,”
the earnest announcer said, over shots of department store Santas, and of
shoppers picking out red-and-green Christmas doodads from the shelves.
“This enables us to learn more about western culture.”

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Beijing– the photos

Bill (the spouse) entrusted me with his digital camera…. This was the first time I had ever used it without him standing by to give advice, encouragement…. Yikes!!
As it was, since I was doing most of the tourism in Beijing with our Australian colleague from the conference, Andrew Vincent, the pics that have me in were all taken by him. (Thanks, Andrew!) But I take credit for showing him how to do it.
Here’s me in front of the Tienanmen Gate to the Forbidden City. The Prez of Israel was visiting at the time. Hence the Israeli flag– one of many.

Continue reading “Beijing– the photos”

Article on the ICTR–the link!

I’m in Seoul airport on my way back to the States from Beijing. I just remembered that shortly before I left home 8-some days ago, the Boston Review finally got my article on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda up onto their website.
So here’s the link for it!
I would love it if you would post any comments you have here– as well as sending them to the BR.
The piece draws heavily on the interviewing and observing I did at the court, in Arusha, last April.

The (Great) Wall that Failed

So yesterday I finally got to see, and climb along, a section of the
edifice of which Richard Nixon memorably said after seeing it, “Why, it sure
is a great wall!” My Australian colleague Andrew Vincent and I had
signed up for an all-day tour that promised us visits to the Wall, the Ming
Tombs, a jade factory, and a center for Traditional Chinese Medicine; a Chinese
lunch; and sundry other delights.

We ended up in a small bus along with five Chinese people visiting the capital
from other parts of the country, two Korean men, and an incredibly talented
and energetic bilingual guide who told us her ‘English’ name was Alexandra
“but please call me Alex.”

It was a longish ride out to our first destination, the jade factory, but
driving through morning-rush-hour Beijing and then its suburbs was interesting
in itself. The city is enormous, with countless clusters of 25- to
35-story high-rises and a sky full of cranes hard at work building yet more.
The traffic moved fairly well– plus, our driver had nerves of steel
and seemed to win every contest of fast-traffic ‘chicken’ that he engaged
in. (Save one. On that occasion, the bus crunched to a halt just
two inches shy of a small passenger car and all of us got tipped off our
seats.) Alongside the motor traffic, streams of bicycles, pedi-carts,
and the occasional bike-ricksha plied endlessly along the bikeways, clustering
to a stop at some interesections then streaming over them when their own
separate traffic lights showed green…

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First explorations, Beijing

Yesterday I managed to get out of our conference hotel here on Jianguo Men
Nei Da Jie [that’s a street name], for a couple of great, if short, excursions.

At lunchtime, I walked with a colleague for two kilometers along this big
boulevard, past massive glossy new shopping malls, hotels, other huge edifices,
until we arrived at Tienanmen Square. The Israeli President is visiting,
so all the large red flags waving outside the Tienanmen Gate to the Forbidden
City were twinned with equally large Israeli flags. (Photo of me in
front of flags to be posted later, I hope.)

Anyway, it was a great walk through what is clearly a busy and rapidly developing
major world metropolis. There are about six or eight lanes of busy traffic
on these big boulevards, flanked on each side by broad bike-ways and
even broader, tree-shaded sidewalks. Everything was immaculately clean
and well-swept, and the sidewalks had a very healthy and lively bustle. There’s
a subway line runs under the street, and around the two or three stations
we passed were clustered hundreds of parked bikes.

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The trials of trying Saddam

There’s a possibility that by October-November 2004 the capture of Saddam Hussein,
which today looks like such a valuable political ‘prize’ for the Bushies,
may look like a difficult political liability. The central question
of who is to control the process of trying and punishing him may have
become so hotly contended by then that many in the administration might wish
that rather than capturing him alive, the forces that stormed his bunker
had somehow allowed him to “be shot while fleeing arrest”.

Hey, they might even come to wish, rather wistfully, that they could simply
have handed him over to the jurisdiction of an “International Criminal Court”
which could take all the decisions around trying the guy–and all the associated
political heat–quite out of their hands!

The “who gets to do it” question around the trying of Saddam Hussein is by
no means as easy or straightforward as it looks…

Continue reading “The trials of trying Saddam”