Geneva Conventions and CPA asset-stripping

You have to love Britain’s world-class leaders in the field of financial media. First, a couple of weeks ago, came the Economist‘s cover with the big title: “Wielders of Mass Deception?” super-imposed over a photo of Bush and Blair. And today comes a piece in the Financial Times reporting on a conference of international-law experts in London who concluded that US Gauleiter L. Paul (Jerry) Bremer’s Order 39, which essentially allowed the global asset-stripping of most of the Iraqi economy at bargain-basement prices, might well be illegal.
The article, by Thomas Catan, reports the following regarding a discussion about Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA):

    “Is what they are doing legitimate, is it legal?” asked Juliet Blanch, a partner at the London-based international law firm Norton Rose. “Most [experts] believe that their actions are not legal”, she said. “There would be no requirement for a new government to ratify their [actions].”
    International law obliges occupying powers to respect laws already in force in a country “unless absolutely prevented” from doing so.

Later, Catan turns to the question of the status of pre-existing, i.e. Saddam-era, contracts:

    The CPA has yet to announce what will become of pre-existing contracts, many of which are held by Russian, Chinese and French companies.
    However, international law experts have said they could be enforced, raising the possibility that contracts with the ousted regime might be more enforceable than those signed with the CPA.

Of course, it all depends whether you actually believe in the validity of international law, and its relevance in matters relating to military occupations. By and large, most governments in the world do believe that situations of military occupation should be governed by international law. Two governments disagree. They are Israel and the US.
Is this an amazing coincidence or what?
The main existing body of international law in such matters consists of the provisions codified in the Geneva Conventions of 1949. The government representatives who met together in Geneva then and voted their agreement to the Conventions still had vividly in mind the depradations that Germany’s military occupation of most of continental Europe had wrought on the peoples and societies of the continent’s non-German peoples. Maybe we should urge the US and Israel to keep those terrible precedents in mind today, too?
Long live the Geneva Conventions! They are one tiny basis of normative agreement in a frequently brutal world.

Thoughts/prayers for Yvette

Much attention has been focused on the decisions that international humanitarian-aid workers in Iraq have been facing in recent weeks. But friends, we also need to give thoughts and prayers to their colleagues elsewhere. And particularly right now, to the aid workers and skill-sharers in Somaliland.
(Don’t know where or what Somaliland is? Go to the site I link to on the right sidebar here called “A Taste of Africa”, where you can learn lots about it.)
Back on October 5, Italian aid worker Annalena Tonelli, who had been in Somaliland for many decades, was shot dead there by unknown assailants. Yvette Lopez, the author of Taste of Africa, has written a lot of posts about Annalena’s life and death. Check out this one, or go to the special section on Annalena down on her left sidebar.
Then, about ten days ago, a British couple called the Eyeingtons who were house-parents at the SOS Children’s Village there were also gunned down.
You can imagine how terrifying this is for the other brave souls–pitifully few in number–who have gone from distant countries to share skills and do aid work in Somaliland.
Yvette herself is one of them. She’s a Filipina social activist/organizer and has been doing some really amazing work in Somaliland under the auspices of an international, Catholic-run (I believe) skill-sharing organization.
You can see the courageous way Yvette has been trying to deal with the latest set of security challenges, while also continuing to make good on her deep commitment to the projects she’s been working with in Somaliland, if you read her posts from most of October.
I’m headed over to Taste of Africa right now, and I’m going to post some good wishes there for Yvette so she knows I care about her. Why don’t you join me and do the same?

“Today in Iraq”, RiverSbend, etc

Yesterday evening I discovered a great new blog called Today in Iraq. It’s written by a guy calling himself “yankeedoodle” who used to be a warrant officer in either the Marines or the Army (I forget which).
He just trawls the news sources for fabulous nuggets of news, info, and commentary on Iraq and presents them in a really clear way along with just the right amount of his own piquantly anti-Bushite commentary.
I just put a link to it onto the bar at the right.
Elsewhere in the blogosphere there’s been a big campaign to stop some cranky elderly Bushophile called Troy who’s been pretending to be Riverbend. He put an ‘S’ into the middle of her URL , made a template that looked just like hers, and then created this entire fake blog about how wonderful it is to be an Iraqi after the arrival of the US forces etc etc.
I did see his fake blog before Blogspot took it down (presumably, for violating their Terms of Service). He’s been trying to get another one up, at www.riverbendsblog.blogspot.com, but evidently it’s taking him some time to get it looking anywhere near authentic.
River herself has some nice commentary on it. But if you really want to max out out on the details of the counter-troy campaign, there’s a whole other blog devoted solely to that.

Israel: Yaalon tells it like he sees it

The Israel Defense Forces’ Chief of Staff Moshe Yaalon was, according to the online edition of the NYT, the “senior military official” quoted in today’s Israeli press as having said that Israel’s current hard-line policies against the Palestinians were working against Israel’s “strategic interest.”
For example, in Wednesday’s Yediot Aharonot, veteran columnist Nahum Barnea quoted the (still un-named) senior official having said that the Israeli-imposed,

    comprehensive travel restrictions and curfews imposed on Palestinians were actually harming Israel’s overall security.
    “It increases hatred for Israel and strengthens the terror organizations,” Mr. Barnea wrote, quoting the official.
    General Yaalon [for it was, as we now know, he] also said that Israel should have eased punitive measures to bolster the fortunes of the former Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, who resigned on Sept. 6 after only four months on the job.
    Mr. Abbas expressed frustration that Mr. Sharon never took concrete steps to convince Palestinians that the Middle East peace plan, initiated in June, would bring about any real improvements in their lives.
    “There is no hope, no expectations for the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, nor in Bethlehem and Jericho,” Mr. Barnea quoted the “military official” as saying. “In our tactical decisions, we are operating contrary to our strategic interest.”

The NYT story, by Greg Myre out of Jerusalem, notes that Yaalon had always previously expressed fairly hawkish sentiments.
Indeed, when he first became IDF Chief of Staff back in July/August of 2002, Yaalon famously said that Palestinian militants were like a “cancer” that needed to be aggressively dealt with. He also expressed full support, at that time, for a policy of imposing tough collective punishments on palestinians that would serve to “burn [or brand] into their consciousness” the understanding that Israel was not about to back down under pressure.
Yaalon’s emphasis on “not backing down under pressure” at all– which of course always used to echo Sharon’s long-held views on the matter– merely buttressed Sharon in not even making tactical redeployments (in Gaza, for example) that could have strengthened the IDF’s broader position.
Not to mention, they would have made life a whole lot better for Gaza’s Palestinians!
So the big questions now are: (1) Will General Yaalon stick to his new, significantly more moderate line, and continue to espouse it openly? and (2) If he does, what will Sharon do about him?

Iran: not quite so “evil”?

US deputy Secretary of State Rich (“Muscle-man”) Armitage has been telling the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the administration is now prepared to talk to Iran about matters of common interest, and no longer seeks “regime change” in Teheran.
According to a report on Radio Free Europe, Armitage “told the committee that Washington shares a number of pressing interests with Iran, including the country’s role in Afghanistan and Iraq and its battle with drug smuggling. He said these issues could warrant resuming limited discussions with Iran but not a ‘broad dialogue with the aim of normalizing relations,’ which were broken off after Tehran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution… ”
According to a story in the NYT today, Armitage told the SFRC that,

    on the positive side, Iran had supported the American-led ouster of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the formation of the Iraqi Governing Council, whose members were chosen by the American occupation authorities.
    Iran also surprised some American officials by showing up last week at the Madrid conference of international donors to Iraq and contributing aid.
    The Governing Council is discussing a deal to ship oil to Iran and receive electricity in return, one administration official said, a step that L. Paul Bremer III, the occupation administrator, has not yet sought to block.
    Mr. Armitage was asked Tuesday by Senator Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, if “regime change” was American policy in Iran. “No, sir,” Mr. Armitage replied, adding that “our policy is to try to eliminate the ability of Iran to carry forward with disruptive policies.”

This news about the Bushies’ new realism on Iran comes in the wake of last week’s small diplomatic breakthrough by heart-throb Dominique de Villepin and his Euro colleagues, in reaching Iran’s agreement to go along with the EU’s demands on nuclear inspections.
It is also long overdue for the administration to start treating Teheran with more nuance than just being a member of the so-called “axis of evil”. After all, if Americans want a hope in heck of ever getting our 130,000 forces out of Iraq without suffering major, major casualties then cooperation with Iran will have to be a part of that exit strategy.
Uncomfortable thought for some in DC and in the generally anti-Iranian US media? Undoubtedly. But they’re going to have to deal with that.
I mean, did anyone in this administration even bother to look at a map of the Gulf region before they cavalierly sent so many US troops so deep into Iraq?
If they had, they might just have happened to notice a couple of things:
(1) Much of Iraq is desert. But there’s a band of heavily populated areas that runs fairly close to the country’s eastern border.
(2) The other side of that eastern border lies Iran, a huge, well-infrastructured country of roughly 65-70 million people.
(3) Many roads link the two countries. Their people share many attributes (and in some cases come from the same families.)

Continue reading “Iran: not quite so “evil”?”

Thinking about atrocity

This week I’ve gotten seriously into writing up, in as definitive a way as possible, the findings of the research project I’ve been working on, off and on, for the last three years, the “Project on Violence and its Legacies: A Challenge for Global Policy” (the VAIL project).
Between all the notes I have on the four larger and numerous minor research trips I’ve made in the past three years, and the mounds of smaller notes, Post-Its, and other comments I’ve accrued on all the readings I’ve amassed– well, I certainly have enough material for at least one book!
The thing is, though, I don’t have all the funding I’d been seeking, in order to pull all my findings together into a big, heavily theoretical study of the topic. But that’s okay. I have a couple of months of funding. So I’ll take the material I already have, and start writing what I can. It will be more empricial, more experiential than the tome I’d originally been thinking of…
But that’s not all bad, either. Maybe this way it’ll be more accessible and can gain a wider readership. And the interview material and other empirical stuff that I have is already informed by a lot of heavy cerebration and theoretical reading. So at this point, I really just need to trust the material I have in hand. And what unbelievable riches I do have! So many note-books stuffed with interviews and personal notes– from Rwanda, from the ICTR in Arusha, from Mozambique, and from South Africa.

Continue reading “Thinking about atrocity”

Iraq Survey Found NO Nuclear Threat

The Washington Post is reporting this morning that David Kay’s Iraq Survey Group found–contrary to what Kay said in public or told the US Congress– that “it is now clear [Saddam] had no active program to build a weapon, produce its key material;s or obtain the technology he needed for either.”
Read that great piece. And read my commentary on it in the next post beneath this one.

Washington Post news division regains sanity!

Praise the Lord! The Washington Post‘s news division, which for long months before the US invasion of Iraq had suffered from what I thought of as the “Hoaglandization” of the entire newspaper, seems finally to have rediscovered its sanity, focus, and journlistic ethics.
(“Hoaglandization”, after prominent WP columnist Jim Hoagland who for some years prior to the invasion had been acting as one of the chief flaks in US journalism for any slight whim or preference expressed by wellpknown Iraqi snake-oil salesman Ahmed Chalabi. And yes, that included Jim acting as an influential cheerleader for the invasion.)
I may be wrong in suspecting that Jim’s general influence on 15th St NW was instrumental in skewing not just the WP’s notoriously pro-war editorial and op-ed pages in that direction but also, over the crucial months prior to March 17, skewing the paper’s news coverage, too.
In those months, anti-war activities and demonstrations got short shrift. The administration’s claims re Saddam’s weapons programs got generally uncritical coverage, with many vital questions about those claims getting unasked, or at least, unreported.
But now, the news division is back on the job, in the time-honored tradition of independent journalism and much more in line with the heroic kind of role that the WP itself played in the days of, for example, the Vietnam war.
(The op-ed pages are still terrifically skewed. And my personal jury is still out on the paper’s own editorial line on war/occupation issues. I’m ready to be persuaded the line is getting better… )
But back to the big, definitive story in today’s paper– the one whose headline states baldly– based on leaks from within David Kay’s “Iraq Survey group”– Iraq Survey Fails to Find Nuclear Threat.
Bart Gellman, who wrote this story, writes:

    Although Hussein did not relinquish his nuclear ambitions or technical records, investigators said, it is now clear he had no active program to build a weapon, produce its key materials or obtain the technology he needed for either.
    Among the closely held internal judgments of the Iraq Survey Group, overseen by David Kay as special representative of CIA Director George J. Tenet, are that Iraq’s nuclear weapons scientists did no significant arms-related work after 1991, that facilities with suspicious new construction proved benign, and that equipment of potential use to a nuclear program remained under seal or in civilian industrial use.

This is truly a great scoop. When Kay was in Washington a couple weeks ago, all he would say in public was that it “would take more time” to come to a definitive judgment on whether Saddam did indeed have any active nuclear program prior to March 17, 2003.
Now, what Kay’s people– including plucky Australian General Stephen D. Meekin, who heads “the largest of a half-dozen units that report to Kay”– and some of the key ISG documents that were leaked to Gellman all reveal is that no amount of extra searching is going to turn up evidence for a program that, these impeccable sources have concluded, never even existed post-1991.
Gellman’s piece, which I urge you all to go and read in full, underlines that it was the nuclear weapons allegations against Saddam that were crucially used by Bush and Blair to explain why they had to launch their invasion right then, in March 2003, rather than leaving more time for UNSCOM’s inspections to do their work. The specter of a nuclear-weapons “mushroom cloud”–and not the much less fearsome threat of a chemical or bio weapons attack– was what was invoked by those two leaders anmd their key advisors as they made their case for the war…
Well, good for Bart Gellman getting the story. Good for General Meekin, for being the only person on Kay’s staff who was willing to be quoted on the record regarding the content of what the ISG had actually found. (Several others spoke “off the record,” Gellman reported– but having Meekin’s assessments there on the record gives the piece a huge amount of heft it would not otherwise have had, and presumably allowed the Post’s lawyers to let its publication go ahead.)
And good for the Post’s new division, having finally gotten back into the business of independently and where necessary critically reporting the news.

Why I’m glad we left Washington DC

Bill–“the spouse”–and I moved our family home to Charlottesville, in central Virginia, from Washington DC back in 1997. It was a bit of a wrench. I was in my mid-40s and not really relishing the prospect of doing all those “newcomer in the community” things. On the other hand, I was feeling increasingly alienated from DC, which is a strange, fairly rootless, and highly segregated city…
Anyway, almost immediately I found I loved living here. One big discovery–I kid you not!–was enfranchisement.
Living in DC, you see, a person has no voting representation in the US Senate or House of Representatives. Hard to believe, I know. US leaders do, after all, routinely prance (or fight) their way around the world declaiming the virtues of one-person-one-vote democracy. But if you actually live in the capital city of this so-called “democracy” you don’t get a vote.
Which means that discussions of national politics held in the salons of the DC neighborhood of Georgetown or whatever all have a highly rarefied tone. Kay Graham (in her day) or Pamela Harriman or other grandes dames of the Georgetown scene may all have a huge effect on national politics by virtue of who they know, whom they can fund-raise for, etc. But they only get to actually be represented in the Senate or Congress by virtue of whatever residence they can establish in out-of-DC vacation spots in Colorado or wherever.
And those of us poor slobs who never had vacation homes? Fuggedabout it. No representation (but plenty of taxation.)
Well, so that was a refreshing change. We came here, and suddenly we get to vote and help organize for Congressional and Senate candidates; and we have a lively and progressive local politics, and a great Delegate in the Virginia legislature (Mitch Van Yahres).
But there are a lot of other reasons it’s a good community to live in, too. One is the city school system, from which our daughter Lorna graduated last summer. We have great community theater, live music, bookstores, and restaurants. And then more recently, yesterday and today, I got to take part in two other community-level events which made me glad I live here.
Yesterday, as part of the weekend-long Virginia Film Festival–held here in C’ville–I was part of a panel discussion that was held following a showing of the great David Russell movie, “Three Kings”.
We even made the front page of today’s local paper! Read all about it here.
Then today, I got to take part, a little vicariously, in the annual conference of an organization I’ve long supported called Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.
Vicariously, because I was actually one of the four women from the C’ville Center for Peace and Justice who put on the lunch for the conference. The leader of our team, Virginia Rovnyak, was stunningly well-organized; and she, the other team members and I enjoyed working together while with one ear we also listened to the goings-on in the main room.
I did have a fleeting thought or two along the lines of, Why is it that some tasks seem to end up so gendered even in so-called “progressive” organizations? But by and large I was really happy to be able to help out. Virginia (the state) has a shocking record as a death-penalty state, and it looks like an extremely “long, hard slog” to be able to change that…
I guess there are a number of reasons so many interesting things end up happening in C’ville. One is that we have the University of Virginia here. Another is that the city is fairly central for the whole state, so a number of state-wide events end up being held here rather than in the state capital, Richmond.
Elsewhere in the city today, a gay-rights group was holding a conference. And for sports afficianados, there was even a big U.Va. football game.
Bill’s out of town this weekend. But I’ll be plenty busy. There’s a memorial service tomorrow, sadly, for my friend Rosemary Johnson, who died on Wednesday. And tonight there’s a pre-Halloween party to go to.
I’m not sure I’m quite in the mood. But on the other hand, it seems like a really important time to be with friends.

Bombs-Away Don and the G.O.P. Senators

Washington Post and NYT both full of great stories today. One in the NYT gave me particular pleasure. It’s Douglas Jehl and David Firestone’s piece about how even some of the Republican senators are getting pissed off with Rumsfeld.
These reportedly even include one of my own senators, John Warner, the very senior Repub who also chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee. Warner himself did not go on the record for the story. But staff in somebody’s office on the GOP side were talking “The Pentagon is not exactly Capitol Hill’s favorite department any more,” one prominent GOP staff member is reported as saying. “Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz just give off this sense that they know better than thou, and that they don’t have to answer our questions.”
Jehl and Firestone also report, possibly significantly, that, “Republican lawymakers and top staff members who were interviewed on Thursday would not say whether they had expressed concern about Mr. Rumsfeld to the White House.”
Well, let’s hope they actually have done so! Let’s hope the Prez takes the advice I gave (at no cost!) back in my Sept. 11, 2003, column in the Christian Science Monitor and gives Bombs-Away Don back his freedom from drudgery in the Pentagon…
And on another note, also in today’s NYT, don’t you just gotta love the freshness and naivete displayed by the Prez after his first few (whirlwind) encounters with the outside world while he was in Asia.
David E. Sanger, traveling with W, has a piece titled “On High-speed Trip, Bush Glimpses a Perception Gap.” He reports:

    Minutes after President Bush finished an hour-long meeting with moderate Islamic leaders on the island of Bali on Wednesday, he approached his staff with something of a puzzled look on his face.
    “Do they really believe that we think all Muslims are terrorists?” he asked, shaking his head. He was equally distressed, he told them, to hear that the United States was so pro-Israel that it was uninterested in the creation of a Palestinian state living alongside Israel, despite his frequent declarations calling for exactly that.
    It was a revealing moment precisely because the president was so surprised.

Like, maybe the Prez should read more full-text newspapers (or hey, how about blogs?) himself, rather than the carefully-edited gobbets of favorable reporting that the staff presents to this modern-day Emperor of Few Clothes every morning?
So did some of the people he met on the Asia tour successfully suggest to him that his global policy wardrobe has fewer real clothes in it that he previously thought?
Sanger reports:

    [E]ven some of Mr. Bush’s aides concede that Mr. Bush has only begun to discover the gap between the picture of a benign superpower that he sees, and the far more calculating, self-interested, anti-Muslim America the world perceives as he speeds by behind dark windows.
    “On a trip like this he can get a glimpse of it, but only a glimpse,” one senior official who sat in on several meetings said. “Of course, when you are moving at warp speed, there isn’t a lot of time to think about what you’re hearing.”