The Pentagon, Chalabi, and the cheerleaders

Regular readers of JWN may have noticed that I’m not the biggest fan of Ahmed Chalabi. Still, I admit there’s something just a touch delightful about seeing him use all his old charms and slipperiness to start turning on his erstwhile handlers in the Pentagon while he gives aid and comfort to “the enemy”, i.e. the French. (The enemy thing is Tom Friedman’s analysis, not mine.)
The other naughty spectator sport I’m engaging in these days is watching all those serried ranks of Op-Ed columnists and various self-styled “experts” who sold Chalabi’s supposed virtues on an eager-to-believe US political class for so many long years– and seeing how those individuals are dealing with the current apparent dust-up between Chalabi and his former friends in Bombs-Away Don’s Pentagon.
Jim Hoagland comes to mind, first and foremost. (Jim should have known better, but for some reason he’s been foaming at the bit to have the US support Chalabi and topple Saddam for the past few years.) Danielle Pletka comes to mind, too: the former foreign-affairs aide for Senator Jesse Helms and now a recognized neocon in her own right.
So today, Danielle has a just-about-indecipherable Op-Ed in the New York Times. I’ve read it a couple of times and still can’t figure what exactly it is she’s trying to say. I’ll give a handsome prize to any JWN reader who can give a reasonable explanation of what she means in this particularly opaque paragraph:

    Members of Iraq’s Governing Council [read: Chalabi–HC]have argued strenuously against an infusion of additional troops–American or otherwise. Already chafing at the cloying stewardship of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Iraq’s interim government is eager to take more responsibility for security and governance of the country. Unlike United States commanders–who some of Mr. Rumsfeld’s skeptics in Washington say have been stifled by the secretary’s lean transformation dream–the interim government has no vested interest in keeping United States troop levels down.

Let’s face it, Danielle Pletka was never particularly bright or well-informed. Such a pity that she has now been reduced to blithering idiocy.

Excavating the pre-9/11 record

From John Pilger via the Sydney Morning Herald via this post on Juan Cole’s blog comes a useful reminder that we should look at what Bush administration heavies were saying about Iraq’s WMD capabilities before Sept. 11, 2001.
Pilger had apparently found a tape of Colin Powell speaking to an audience in Cairo in February 2001, when CP apparently said that Saddam “has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction…”
That prompted me to go into the State Department’s website and see what relevant texts and transcripts I might find there from that same period. Just a quick search turned up some very similar utterances by CP. Like this one from a press briefing he gave while on his plane traveling to Cairo Feb 23, 2001:

    I think it’s important to point out that for the last 10 years, the policy that the United Nations, the United States has been following, has succeeded in keeping Iraq from rebuilding to the level that it was before… [E]ven though they may be pursuing weapons of mass destruction of all kinds, it is not clear how successful they have been. So to some extent, I think we ought to declare this a success. We have kept him contained, kept him in his box.

Or this one, when CP was on a plane two days later, traveling to Kuwait:

    QUESTION: Are you stunned that he [Saddam] is still in power after all these years?
    SECRETARY POWELL: Stunned isn?t the word. I never ever have underestimated the power of a dictator, and I don?t think you?ll find me on the record ever predicting his demise at that time. But I also thought that we had pretty much removed his stings and frankly for ten years we really have.

Or this one, which records remarks he made on arrival in Kuwait:

    it is at the top of the agenda to make sure that we continue to contain Iraq so that it does not develop the kind of weapons that it is trying to develop. We have been successful for the last ten years in keeping him from developing those weapons and we will continue to be successful.

So, having found those extremely suggestive quotes, I thought let’s hike on over to the White House website, see what they have in the National Security Council archive over there that relates to pre-Sept. 11, 2001 utterances by, oh, the Prez, or Condi Rice, or whoever…
But here’s something scary. If you go to the White House site and look for the texts of speeches etc on the subject of “National Security” by clicking this button, the texts they give only go back to September 11, 2001. Not a day earlier!
Is someone trying to whitewash the record there or something? (By contrast, if you click on “Middle East”, which is a section that deals with Israeli-Arab issues but NOT Iraq, the statements there go back to February 14, 2001.)
There is one intriguing-looking button on the White House site that says simply: “Iraq: Apparatus of lies”. But my understanding is that it may not actually refer to the White House itself…

Palestine/Israel: one state or two?

I was reading Imshin’s blog from Israel, and came across a post in which she translated a long extract from a recent article by Shlomo Avnieri bitterly criticizing the few brave souls inside Israel who started to argue that, given the huge degree of demographic mixing that the settlers have achieved, maybe the best path now is to aim for a unitary binational state in Israel/Palestine rather than for the very difficult disaggregation of the populations into two mono-ethnic states.
If Avnieri’s arguments are the best that the “anti- one state” brigade can come up with, then that is really a poor showing. I note that Avnieri has been around for a VERY LONG TIME as first an Israeli Foreign Ministry official whose arguments were always (no surprise here) that Israel could do no wrong, and more recently as a retired person whose tune seems not to have been changed by one jot. Also, he doesn’t seem to have learned much over recent years. He notes the collapse of many mutli-ethnic states after the fall of communism, but seems unaware of the continued existence of large numbers of other multi-ethnic states around the world.
Even on Canada and Belgium, the recognition he gives is grudging indeed:

    Canada and Belgium–two veteran bi-national states–are facing great difficulties, in which the last word has not yet been said, even though no one has been murdered or killed there for over 150 years.

(Quick question to readers: would you rather live in Canada today, or in Israel? In Belgium, or in mono-ethnic Saudi Arabia?)
Most importantly–since this is really is the best analogy to the prospect facing Jewish Israelis–he totally neglects the incredible experiment in multi-culturalism and multi-ethnicism that has been underway in South Africa for the past nine years.
Here’s why the South African experiment is so relevant: because there, as in any future Israeli-Palestinian binational state, you have members of the colonizing community living in full civic equality within one state with members of the colonized community. And yet, with huge amounts of creativity and goodwill, they are managing to do it.
In his article, Avnieri asks huffily a bunch of questions that he assumes to think we will agree would have the aanswer “It’s impossible!”
However, the record of South Africa’s amazing cultura/political transformation shows us that for a forward-looking, generous-hearted people, it is by no means “impossible” to find answers to the kinds of questions he asks. Such as these:

    * How will it be possible to run a state in which half of the population will see the fifteenth of May as a holiday, and the other half as a tragedy, a day of national mourning: What will be celebrated exactly?
    * What will be taught in mixed state schools, for instance, about Herzl: Founder of a national movement or western colonialist? What will be taught about the Mufti (of Jerusalem in the period of the British Mandate–I.J.): National hero or collaborator with the Nazis? Or maybe one thing will be taught in the Jewish schools and another in the Arab schools?
    * Will it be permitted to name streets after Hovevei Tzion (a group of ninteenth century Jewish settlers–I.J.), Herzl, Bialik (Israel?s national poet–I.J.), Ben Gurion or (heaven help us) Jabotinsky (founder of the right wing Revisionist Party, that provided the ideological basis for the Etzel and the Lehi Organizations–I.J.)? Will roads be named after Izzadin A-Kassam and Haj Amin al-Husseini? Will Zionism Bvd. in Haifa change its name to something “neutral” (Avineri obviously brings this example because this road used to be called UN Bvd. and its name was changed in 1975 when the UN passed a resolution equating Zionism with racism–I.J.)? Or will a parallel road be named “Hamas Bvd.”, for the sake of balance?
    * What will be taught about the Holocaust? A terrible crime or a Jewish “invention”?
    * How will the history of the 1948 war be taught? What will be said in schools about the suicide bombers: Murderers or heroes of the War of Independence?
    * If organizations, Jewish or Arab, threatening violent action, will be established, which police force exactly will deal with them?
    *If the state has an army, what will it be called exactly? Or maybe there will be two armies, the IDF and the PLA?

But his pessimism that answers to such questions can ever be found is quite misplaced. Let him go to South Africa. Let as many Jewish Israelis as possible go there, and see with their own eyes how challenges exactly similar to these ones have been addressed there…

Camp David 25 years after

So, we’ve ridden out the 20-hour power-out that Hurricane Isabel brought us, and finally I have time to write a few quick things about the conference I went to in DC Wednesday, that marked the 25th anniversary of the Egyptian-Israeli Camp David accords.
Jimmy Carter was there, presiding, and just about all the people who’d worked for him on Camp David-related things. Except Cy Vance and Roy Atherton, of course, RIP.
On the Israeli and Egyptian sides, neither Menachem Begin, Anwar Sadat nor Moshe Dayan was there (RIP). But Aharon Barak–now Israel’s very distinguished Chief Justice– and Eli Rubinstein (now attorney-general) were both there in person. Mubarak’s foreign-affairs advisor Osama el-Baz participated by videolink from Cairo, where he’s been busy trying to help nail down another ceasefire in Palestine/Israel; and Boutros Boutros-Ghali sent in a (non-interactive) videotaped message from Paris.
The first thing that struck me from sitting in the audience for the day-long event was how much everyone seems these days to take the fact of Israel’s peace with Egypt totally for granted.
The CD accords of September 1978 did, however, spell out agreements between the Egyptians and Israelis on two issues: one, that the two governments would negotiate a bilateral peace agreement within three months, and two, that negotiations would start on establishment of a self-governing authority for the Palestinians.
As I mentioned here a few days ago, the Egyptians and Israelis got theirs, but that Palestinian part of the negotiation went nowhere.
So what struck me during Wednesday’s conference was the degree to which that unfinished business totally dominated the discussions…

Continue reading “Camp David 25 years after”

Powell’s quote of the decade

I generally like to give Colin Powell the benefit of the doubt. But this quote, from him, from today’s Washington Post, is a classic of governmental gobbledygook:

    there was no effort on the part of the Reagan administration to either ignore it or not take note of it.

The “it” in question? Saddam Hussein’s March 1988 poison-gas attack against some of his own Kurdish citizens in Halabja, which reportedly killed 5,000 people.
As the Post’s Rajiv Chandrasekaran notes in the piece,

    Although the United States condemned the Iraqi government’s use of chemical weapons as a “grave violation” of international law, the Reagan administration did not sanction Hussein, who was regarded as a U.S. ally because of his war against Iran’s Islamic revolutionary government. At the time, the State Department said there were “indications” that Iran had used chemical artillery shells against Iraqi positions in the area…

And oh, Reagan’s national security advisor at that time was– Colin Powell.

Hutton enquiry hots up

Lord Hutton’s enquiry into the circumstances of British WMD specialist David Kelly’s July suicide has been getting very exciting. This week, lawyers for the Kelly family and for BBC journo Andrew Gilligan have been allowed to cross-examine some of the high-ranking government witnesses.
Today, Kelly’s supervisor at the Ministry of Defence Andy Shuttleworth told the enquiry that Kelly had been “actively encouraged” to talk to the press since 1991. Part of Kelly’s regular performance review was in fact based on how often he had done this, Shuttleworth said. Kelly also had wide latitude in doing so and was not required to get advance permission…
So much for the MoD/spook types who had told Hutton earlier that Kelly had gone ways beyond the bounds in talking to numerous journos, including Gilligan.
In another development, deputy chief of defence intelligence Martin Howard admitted that Dr Kelly was not specifically asked for his consent before the MoD leaders decided that they would confirm, if asked, that he was indeed the person who had come forward to admit having talked to Gilligan. (Once again, putting the lie to claims made earlier by MoD types that they thought Kelly had received advance notification that he was about to be skewered in public.)
Howard was being X-examined by Kelly family barrister Jeremy Gompertz. At one point, Gompertz asked:

    “The procedure adopted, Mr Howard, I suggest, amounted to a parlour game for journalists, would you agree?” said Mr Gompertz, “or was it more like a game of Russian roulette?”

I am starting to develop a little theory about the uniquely constructive role independent judicial enquiries can make, in parliamentary democracies, in uncovering the murkier aspects of domestic politics that the elected leaders would rather not talk about….
Earlier this month, we had the very significant report of the enquiry in Israel headed by Supreme Court Justice Theodore Or. He was looking into the causes of the confrontations in early October 2000 between the Israeli police and many thousands of rioting Israeli citizens who are ethnic Palestinians.
Or took a long time to report, but his 3-man team did what I think is a great job of explaining why, 55 years after Israel’s creation as a specifially Jewish state, the 18 percent of the citizens who are ethnic Palestinians still feel badly discriminated against and marginalized at every point… You can read an English-language digest of the 831-page document if you go here.
Did I mention that during those events, the Israeli police shot dead 13 Palestinians, 12 of whom were citizens of Israel. (Which is why they got an enquiry, while the 2,400-plus Palestinians in the occupied territories who have been killed by Israelis– mainly by members of the security forces– never did get one.)
It also makes me think of the important role that the commission headed by Judge Goldstone, in South Africa, played in helping build a climate of accountability by his country’s until then notoritously brutal and trigger-happy police…
Let’s hope Or’s enquiry and the Hutton enquiry can have the same kind of wide-ranging effectiveness in changing state practises that Goldstone’s did.

Mideast anniversaries

This day, ten years ago, I was sitting on the White House lawn watching the truly bizarre sight of all the leaders of the US Jewish community and the US Congress–people who until three days earlier had excoriated Yasser Arafat’s name with every fiber of their being–as they lined up to have their own special photo ops with the head of the PLO.
That was the signing of the Oslo peace accords. The next day, Norwegian Foreign Minister Johan Holst came to our house and described some of the ins and outs of what had happened along the way.
Holst died of a stroke not long after. Rabin was killed by a Jewish extremist in 1995. Only Arafat, of those three “principals”, is still alive. And look where he is today…
Twenty-five years ago this day, I was in Beirut, Ms. eager young hotshot reporter, reporting the breaking news on the reactions of Arafat and other PLO leaders to the Israeli-Egyptian negotiations then ongoing at Camp David.
Just a few days later, Begin, Sadat, and Carter emerged from the woods to announce that the Israelis and Egyptians had concluded two parallel Accords. One laid down a process whereby Israel and Egypt would rapidly negotiate a final peace treaty. The other, a process whereby the Israelis and Palestinians would enter a transitional phase on the way to their eventual peace treaty.
The Egyptians and Israelis got theirs. The Palestinians (need it be noted?) did not.
Since then, the number of Jewish settlers in the occupied territories–including East Jerusalem, which many Israeli tallies of this figure don’t even bother to include these days– has soared to more than 400,000. Four million-plus Palestinian refugees still languish in their forced exile. Three million Palestinians live in the walled-off Bantustanettes that the occupation authority has devised for them… Six million Israelis live in fear of the next suicide bombing.
And 25 years in the future– what?

Palestinian people power

Saw some great photos on the BBC website today, of the big gatherings outside the Muqataa in Ramallah last night after Sharon’s cabinet voted to try to expel Arafat.
YA seemed to be in his element, greeting and blessing them. Now, wouldn’t it be great if he realized that the ONLY source of any power and legitimacy he has is the organized Palestinian people, and really threw his weight behind their continued civilian, nonviolent mass organizing?
It was the organized, unarmed Palestinian people whose steadfast and nearly completely nonviolent intifada sustained from 1987 thru 1993 brought him back into the homeland in 1994… It was the organized unarmed Palestinian people who elected him President in January 1996…
Too bad he used so much of his early power to crush their civilian mass-organization networks. Is it too late for him to learn his lesson on this?
Then again, is it too late for Sharon to learn there ain’t no forceful way to bring peace and security to his people, either??
The Israeli press has had a number of articles recently that strongly indicate that Sharon is kind of losing his marbles or his sanity. Here’s one by Hannah Kim from today’s Ha’Aretz.
Both sides, it seems to me, are going through serious crises of leadership. Actually, it may be that Israel’s is more severe than the Palestinians’.

Juan Cole– more user-friendly than ever!

Juan Cole’s Informed Comment blog, which is the world’s best English-language read on Iraq, is more user-friendly than ever. Now, he’s posting his items separately, and they have headlines. So you or I can seasily scan thru the voluminous amount of info he puts up each day to find the topic that really catches our eye, and then link to the exact item we want to send our readers to.
Like this one, today, on the time it’ll take to organize elections in Iraq just to write the drafters of the new Constitution… not to mention the time it’ll take ’em to write it, then organize an adoption process.
Trouble is, nearly everything Juan posts is really worth reading.
Still, thanks so much Juan, for the new user-friendliness!
(Talking of my linkees, anyone know what’s happened to Salam of Dear Raed fame? I guess I read somewhere that his house was “searched” by the ever-friendly US military. I hope he’s not sitting in some hell-hole of a stinky jail with a vomit-stained bag over his head… Come to think of it, I hope no Iraqis are in that situation, but I suspect that some hundreds of them probably are.)