Just World News with Helena Cobban

It has come to my attention that at least some bona fide researchers who sent an email to Oxford Research International to request the “press packet” of materials that I referred to in a couple of posts last week had this request rejected.
Dr. Silvia Iacuzzi of ORI wrote one researcher the following (apparently generic) letter:

Dear Sir/Madam,
Thank you for your interest.
I regret to inform you that further to misuses and wrong quotations, we
are not releasing any further information regarding the survey in Iraq
for the time being.
However, you may want to consult the BBC website
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3254028.stm).
Best regards,
Silvia Iacuzzi

I would be interested to more about Iacuzzi’s specific charge of “misuses and wrong quotations.” And btw, don’t bother rushing to the BBC story she references, which is the highly inadequate piece of reporting by Barnaby Mason that I referred to in this post.
The more I thought about it, however, the more puzzled and upset I became about the idea that information like that gathered by the researchers of the ORI/Oxford University team– in coordination with researchers from the Universities of Dohuk and Baghdad, in Iraq– should in any way be considered “proprietary”.
To my mind, this kind of information is vital for international peace and security. Decisions taken on the basis of having or not having such information could result in the loss of scores of thousands of lives and all the rest of the human suffering that is associated with war.
If people think– quite rightly, imho– that vital lifesaving information in the pharmaceutical realm should be made available to those AIDS-sufferers and others who need it regardless of so-called “intellectual property” concerns, then why not the information that ORI and its university collaborators have collected?
Another issue. When the 3,244 Iraqi women and men who graciously gave of their time to answer the lengthy list of questions asked by the researchers, were they made fully aware that the answers they gave would be aggregated into a proprietary product over which neither they nor any democratically accountable body would subsequently have any control, but which would be controlled by a private company in far-off Britain?
Or, when these Iraqis graciously gave of their time etc., were they doing so based on some hope–not disabused by the poll-takers–that their voices would be heard, and would be aggregated into a report which would be part of the global discourse on war and peace issues in their country?
If the latter, then I would say that if ORI now seeks to exercize proprietary control over the results of the poll it is guilty of a serious breach of basic research ethics, and also a serious breach of the trust of the Iraqi respondents to its poll– as perhaps too, of that of many of the Iraqi poll-takers themselves, if they were also not fully aware of the terms under which the project was being conducted.
Comments? Further ideas?

From a piece by Dexter Filkins in today’s NYT:

As the guerrilla war against Iraqi insurgents intensifies, American soldiers have begun wrapping entire villages in barbed wire.
In selective cases, American soldiers are demolishing buildings thought to be used by Iraqi attackers. They have begun imprisoning the relatives of suspected guerrillas, in hopes of pressing the insurgents to turn themselves in….

Sounds familiar?? Well, it is:

American officials … acknowledge that they have studied closely the Israeli experience in urban fighting. Ahead of the war, Israeli defense experts briefed American commanders on their experience in guerrilla and urban warfare.

Filkins cites Brig. Gen. Michael A. Vane, who is deputy chief of staff for doctrine concepts and strategy at the United States Army Training and Doctrine Command, as having recently written: “[W]e recently traveled to Israel to glean lessons learned from their counterterrorist operations in urban areas.”
Well, jolly good for General Vane. Maybe… But totally bad for everyone else concerned.
D’you think the folks in the United States Army Training and Doctrine Command haven’t heard yet about the fact that these tough-guy tactics haven’t actually ‘worked’ for Israel? That is, more than three years after the IDF instituted practices of massive over-reaction, strangulatingly tight movement controls, proactive assassinations, and all those other tools from the old playbook of colonial “pacification” campaigns — they still haven’t succeeded in forcing the Palestinians to bow to their will.
As none other than the IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon himself recently admitted publicly. As I noted here on October 29, Ya’alon had told Israeli journalists the day before that the comprehensive travel restrictions and curfews his forces had imposed on Palestinians were actually harming Israel’s overall security.
“It increases hatred for Israel and strengthens the terror organizations,” Ya’alon was reported as saying. Also: “In our tactical decisions, we are operating contrary to our strategic interest.”
See also the very similar criticisms that four retired heads of Israel’s “Shin Bet” security agency have voiced recently about the policies that the Sharon government (and before it, let’s not forget, the Sharon-plus-Labor government) has mandated toward the Palestinians. You can read a full, English-language version of the interview with the four SB heads here.
So here’s my simple question. I do believe I’ve asked it on JWN before now; but it seems it still needs repeating: If these exact same types of policy have evidently not ‘worked’ at pacifying the Palestinians, why do some people in the US military think they can possibly work against the Iraqis?

Continue reading “Like, this approach has “worked” for Israel??”

Today’s WaPo has a significant story from Defense Correspondent Vernon Loeb, in which he quotes an anonymous “senior army official” as telling him,

Four Army divisions — 40 percent of the active-duty force — will not be fully combat-ready for up to six months next year, leaving the nation with relatively few ready troops in the event of a major conflict in North Korea or elsewhere…

Loeb explains that:

The four divisions — the 82nd Airborne, the 101st Airborne, the 1st Armored and the 4th Infantry — are to return from Iraq next spring, to be replaced by three others, with a fourth rotating into Afghanistan. That would leave only two active-duty divisions available to fight in other parts of the world.
Briefing reporters at the Pentagon, the official said the four returning divisions will be rated either C-3 or C-4, the Army’s two lowest readiness categories, for 120 to 180 days after they return as vehicles and helicopters are overhauled and troops are rested and retrained…
This dip in readiness could have political consequences for President Bush, who sharply criticized the Clinton administration during the 2000 campaign for allowing two Army divisions to fall to the lowest readiness category in 1999 because of peacekeeping obligations in the Balkans.
“Obviously, this is much worse in terms of the numbers,” said Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee who has called for increasing the size of the Army.

The WaPo helpfully placed the link to that piece on the front-page of its website today right next to a link to a piece in tomorrow’s “Outlook” section that reproduces the answers Loeb got to a question he asked five or six US commanders in different parts of Iraq, about how exactly they back up their constantly iterated claims that they are “winning” there.
In the lead to this piece, the editors note that these claims continued to be made, “even as attacks against U.S. forces increased across the country and a series of high-profile bombings and helicopter shoot-downs helped create the impression in the world media that the insurgents were gaining ground… ”
So then, they give the answers to this question to you “from the horses’ [i.e., these commanders’] mouths”:

Continue reading “US Army readiness down, effectiveness claimed (from WaPo)”

I want to recapitulate that part of the findings of the Oxford Research International poll that I cited yesterday, here and here, that concerned the attitudes of Iraqis toward the continued presence of the US/UK forces in their country.
I also want to experiment with composing off-line and then uploading the text into the blog. Why not? (I’ve had bad problems with trying to do it before now; but I’m planning a different approach today.Update: Still problematic. *sigh*)
So anyway, as I wrote yesterday, the question of whether Iraqis consider the presence of the occupation-power forces to be helpful or detrimental to their sense of security and wellbing is an important piece of information.
Yesterday, I wrote that I was glad that ORI had provided the evidence for that. But the issue is not quite simple, since no version of the question, “How do you view the impact that the US/UK forces have on your sense of security and wellbeing?” was directly put to the respondents.
What we had, instead, was the respondents revealing some aspect of their views on this issue slightly indirectly, in their answers to two of the other questions that were posed:
First, when asked to describe the degree of trust that they had in a long list of institutions in the country, one of the institutions was “The US and UK occupation forces”. That question revealed that 78.8% of respondents had “Not very much” or “None at all”, while 21.2% said they had “A great deal” (7.6%) or “Quite a lot” (13.6%).
Second, (although I think in the way the questionnaires were administered, this came prior to the other question), people were asked to provide their own, singular response to the Question, “What would be the worst thing that could happen to you in the next 12 months?” Presumably, the kinds of answers that people actually gave to that were aggregated somewhat. But it is still notable that in response to a free-form question like that, 15% of respondents answered with (some version of) “Occupation forces will not leave Iraq”, while 0.6% answered with some version of “American forces leaving Iraq”. A wide range of other types of answer were also, of course, given there.
So, we have a ratio of 15.0 to 0.6, that is 25 to 1, of people thinking US forces staying to US forces leaving is the one worst scenario they can imagine. This is, of course, highly suggestive of the way all of opinion might break down on the issue. And it certainly accords with the general trend of the responses in the “trust/distrust” section, except that there the ratio of “lots of trust” answers to “little or no trust” answers was 3.7 to 1, not 25 to 1.
In addition, in the question regarding the “one worst thing”, I note that 84.4% did not express themselves one way or the other on the question of the staying or leaving of the US/UK forces. So obviously we cannot say flat-out that the 25-to-1 ratio represents the whole of Iraqi opinion. What we can say is that the evidence strongly suggests that Iraqis would prefer to see the withdrawal of the occupation forces and to face whatever followed that in their own way, rather than to have the occupation forces stick around. And despite the generally low levels of social trust revealed in some of the data, the strength of the belief expressed that some indigenous form of democracy could work for them was impressive, and would back up the supposition that they see a way to resolve their internal problems among themselves, rather than relying on the US/UK forces to solve them for them.
That’s great! Bring the troops home!
I note, too, that new data from polling inside the USA that was carried out by the Program on International Public Attitudes at the University of Maryland, also accords with this view. In releasing the resukts of the new poll, PIPA Director Steve Kull said, “A very strong 71% said the UN should “take the lead to work with Iraqis to write a new constitution and build a new democratic government”–up from 64% in June
and 50% in April. Just 26%, in the current poll, say the US should take the lead.”
By the way, yesterday I noted that I felt a little intimidated by all the copyright notices attached to the portions of the report that ORI had sent me. But to make things as easy as possible for you, I suggest you click here to send them an email and request your own copy.

I just finished writing the last post, which highlighted the recent survey of Iraqi opinion carried out by Oxford Research International, when the good folks there at ORI emailed me over a bundle of docs summarizing their methods and findings.
These docs all carry imposing copyright symbols. If they hadn’t, I could have posted them on my website and just linked to ’em from here. (I feel very ambivalent about all issues of intellectual “property”.) I also note that the survey was carried out jointly between the (for-profit) ORI and the Sociology Dept at Oxford University. Shouldn’t a publicly-funded university make its findings freely available to the public?
As it is, I’ve decided to make “fair use” of what ORI sent to me, and shall summarize what I think are the most significant findings. For background on the survey (timing [Oct-Nov], sample-size [3,244], etc) you’ll have to read my last post, Iraq’s Battle of the Ayatollahs.
So, findings, running rapidly down the summary that ORI sent me:
On contentment:

People in Iraq are not particularly unhappy with their lives (average score [I think this is the score for happiness, not unhappiness? HC] 5.7 on a scale of 1-10). Historically, life satisfaction in 71 countries around the world stood at an average mean score of 6.8, with some countries scoring as low as 3.7 (Moldova) and 4.0 (Ukraine). Neighbouring Turkey scored 6.3, South Africa and South Korea 6.0

Continue reading “Oxford survey on Iraqi opinion, contd.”

Ayatollah Sistani says he wants the commission that decides on his country’s new constitution to be elected. Ayatollah Bremer says he wants the commission that decides on Sistani’s country’s new constitution to be sorta-kinda-well– not exactly elected.
Who will decide between these two views?
Unlike Ayatollah Tom Friedman, I happen to think it should be the Iraqi people who decide. Which makes the results of a recent survey on Iraqi opinion released by a group called Oxford Research International particularly relevant.
The survey sampled the views of 3,244 Iraqis picked out by random sampling, who were interviewed in their homes in October and early November. They were asked to rate their confidence in 11 different organizations including the Interim Governing Council, the rebuilding Iraqi Army, the UN, etc etc.
Of the eleven different bodies, Ayatollah Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority won the laurels for “most distrusted”: some 57% of those questioned said they had zero trust in the CPA and 22% said they had “very little” trust in it (for a total distrust index of 79%). A resounding eight percent said they had “a great deal” of trust in the CPA.
As for the (slightly general) category of religious leaders, they reportedly won the laurels for “most trusted”. 42% of respondents said they had a great deal of trust in the RLs, and another 28% expressed “quite a lot” of trust in them (for a total trust index of 70%). Around 11% said they had “no trust at all” in the RLs.

Continue reading “Iraq’s Battle of the Ayatollahs”