Kelly/Hutton redux

Why do I find the Hutton Inquiry so addictive? Is it because I wish so much we had something similar here in the US?
My engagement with it is a bit episodic. Like, late at night when I’m too tired to get on with the work I should be doing. But anyway, it strikes me that some really interesting things have been happening this week, though the Inquiry has not been sitting in public session. Lord H decided to take a week’s hiatus from that, in order to plan his endgame, the details of which will be announced tomorrow (Friday) morning.
So today– or yesterday?– the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) suddenly, and belatedly, decides to make available to Lord H the transcript of a closed session it held July 16 with David Kelly testifying.
The day before DK killed himself…
I gather that somehow the text of the transcript had gotten leaked someplace, so then shamefacedly (or who knows, maybe brazenly?) the ultra-hush-hush ISC folks told Lord H, oh hey, you might just want to take a look at this transcript we have??
Weird-oh. I mean, Lord H has shown his determination to get to the bottom of Kelly’s death. he’s subpoenaed all kinds of internal spooks’ email, etc etc., not to mention calling Tony Blair and Defense Sec Geoff Hoon to appear in person…
But the ISC sat on this stuff for all these weeks??
Hutton to his immense credit– I jjust love these senior judicial types once they git the bit between their teeth– immediately posted the transcript on the Inquiry’s website. It’s in PDF, so I can’t easily reproduce a lot of it here. Below here is one key portion that I quickly keyboarded: in it, DK is admitting that, yes, he did express doubts to Beeb reporter Andrew Gilligan about the veracity of the infamous “45 minute” claim regarding Saddam’s alleged CBW readiness.
In another portion, DK admits that he told numerous people–including Gilligan– that he thought that while he was 100% sure that Saddam’s people had CW programs, he was only 30% sure that they had the actual chemicall weapons.
Actually, the transcript is worth reading for lots more details as well as the general atmospherics that it reveals.
The ISC, by the way, is a committee of folks appointed by the PM and reporting to him, rather than to Parliament (which the Foreign Affairs Cttee reports to). So the political dynamic at the ISC is, ahem, not necessarily one of open accountability to the people’s elected representatives, to say the least.
Anyway, here’s the small portion of the transcript that I just keyboarded:

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Appeal for a conscientious objector

Chuck Fager, the head of Quaker House in Fayetteville NC, has sent a message saying that Marine Corps Conscientious Objector (CO) Stephen Funk needs some cards and letters of support. Funk has just recently been transferred to the brig in Camp Lejeune, NC to serve a 6-month sentence.
This is the same brig where dozens of Marine COs were detained and harassed during the first Persian Gulf War.
As a public conscientious objector to war and an openly gay man, Funk is at particular risk. The more his jailers know that the outside world is watching, the better (we hope) they’ll treat him. (This is called the Amnesty International Theory.) Funk would therefore appreciate letters from supporters at the following address:
Stephen Funk
Building 1041
PSC 20140
Camp Lejeune, NC 28542
More details from his defense committee:

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Thoughts from/on Richmond, Virginia

Monday night, I was speaking to a fairly large audience at the University of Richmond. About the war. I focused quite a lot on ‘How did the country get into this quagmire in Iraq?’ and presented an answer that focused heavily on the fact that, imho, a small coterie of ideologues based in Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney’s offices had in essence “captured” the US nation’s foreign policy and taken or dragged the nation into the war.
Which is all good and true as far as it goes. I was glad, though, that a male student in the audience put up his hand and said he personally had not felt “dragged” or “taken” into the war but that he had supported it, based on the new kind of fear and vulnerability that he had experienced since 9/11.
Soon as he said that, I was glad he had added that important dimension to the picture. Because the fact remains true that a large majority of US citizens did support the decision to go to the war, at the time, even if many of those former supporters are now wondering what the heck it was they got us all into.
We in the antiwar movement need to speak centrally to those erstwhile war supporters.
That was why I was so glad that that student had stuck up his hand and contributed to the discussion. (Plus, imho, it probably takes a degree of guts and self-confidence for a young male to admit in a large public setting that he experiences or has experienced fear.)
I started to try to engage with him. I probably didn’t do the greatest of all possible jobs. I tried to make the point that fear, while quite understandable in the circs, is not of itself a great guide to action: we still need to call on our capacities for logic and reason. (The violence between Israelis and Palestinians comes to mind here.)
I also started to make the point that a situation of sort of near-existential fear is one that most of “the other 96 percent” of the world’s population are already much more familiar with, and have lived with for a while; and that in many cases it has informed the much more war-averse attitudes that you find in places other than the US…
Anyway, thanks again to that questioner for forcing me to start to deal with this issue more seriously. The “small coterie” has certainly been an important part of the story. But we do also need to deal with the huge reserve of popular support for the war that they were able to draw on…
Before the talk, I had a very friendly dinner with a small group of UR faculty and students. Being as how we were in Richmond, former capital of the Confederacy, I felt almost obliged to state at one point that “We Quakers were right about slavery and you will all soon see, I hope, that we are right about violence and war.” Except of course Quakers aren’t supposed to be prideful, so this is not a point that it’s particularly appropriate to word in just that way…

A columnist’s job is never done

I just finished writing my CSM column for this Thursday’s paper (9/11). As soon as I get to the published version, as usual I’ll put up a link to it. They usually put it up on the Wednesday evening, on the Commentary section of their website.
I shan’t reveal here the main policy recommendation I make in it. (A pathetic attempt to build suspense, I know… But also, out of respect to the CSM.) But I do also point out in the piece that the main issue is not who’s the general commanding any US, UN, or multilateral forces, but which political authority it is that the general reports to.
Should it continue to be Bombs-Away Don Rumsfeld, the present boss of both Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the military commander on the ground, and Paul Bremer, the head of the political side of the operation there– or should it be Kofi Annan or someone designated by him?
So I was interested to read this on Juan Cole’s site today:

    A French diplomat told al-Sharq al-Awsat in Paris that the French could accept American military command in Iraq as long as it was authorized by the UN and as long as the right political arrangements within Iraq were made. He even allowed for the posibility of a NATO role. In part, the French attitude will depend on the outcome of talks between French President Jacques Chirac and George W. Bush on Sept. 13.

Who do YOU vote for, JWN readers? Bombs-Away Don or Mr. UN?

Bush (speech) notes

Reactions to Sunday night’s speech:
(1) Back to the scared-deer look. Makes you sorry for the guy.
(2) Notably peevish and ungracious toward the UN. UN has “an opportunity, and the responsibility” to help out. So says Nanny Bush. But where was even one moment of reaching out to the United Nations by, for example, expressing his sympathy over the loss of Sergio de Mello and the other UN people there? Bush had actually met Sergio, after all… A couple of sentences of memories of the man’s human qualities would have spoken volumes to key audiences both inside the US and overseas.
(3) Still trying the tired old trick of labeling all actions he doesn’t like as “terrorism”. Has the guy read read no history??? (Silly question, Helena!) But just for the record, I can say throughout my entire lifetime, from watching the British dismantle their empire until now, it’s notable how often imperial powers fall into this particular discourse of (anti-)terrorism. Why, for the pillars of the apartheid regime, Nelson Mandela was for decades the “arch-terrorist”! This discourse not only doesn’t solve problems, it actually aggravates them, because the imperial power ends up using highly counter-productive means to react to understandable and quite predictable political setbacks.
Oh well, I’m off to Richmond, VA today to give a talk. Also have to write a CSM column for Thursday (9/11). Better stop now.

Abu Mazen/David Kelly

I just quickly want to say this about Abu Mazen, whom I know a little, and whose career I have followed for some 30 years now. He is a very decent person who sincerely wants his best for his people and the world.
Why, when I follow his news these days, do I keep getting so eerily reminded of David Kelly, the British WMD specialist whose frustrations with his job led to the tragedy of his suicide (and to the ongoing drama of the Hutton Inquiry into his death)?
I think it’s the strong sense I have of each of these two decent, slightly shy men being ground between historical forces that are much larger and much more ruthless than they are, and whose ruthlessness these gentle people can only guess at.
Kelly was hung out to dry, essentially, by the ruthlessness of the Blair government, including both the coterie around Blair and the folks at the MoD (but also by the British media and the strutting egos on the Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee).
Abu Mazen, for his part, is being royally hung out to dry by Sharon (who now seems to be openly gloating that he’s “off the hook” regarding the Roadmap), by Prez Bush, whose promises of supportive intervention have led to nothing (but also, secondarily, by his old comrade-in arms, Yasser Arafat).
Someone, someone, please throw Abu Mazen a life-line before he feels compelled to follow Kelly’s path.

Not irritating, not provincial

So I guess the word got out to Imshin of Not a Fish! that I had been describing her on the Main Page of JWN as a “sassy (if sometimes irritatingly provincial-Israeli) working mother”. She recently changed the title of her blog to Not a Fish (provincially speaking), indicating that she has a robust sense of humor.
Then, around the same time (this was last Sunday), she wrote a great and lengthy post that seemed quite clearly to deal with the charge that she was “irritatingly provincial.” I thought it was so articulate and expressed so much of what many of my Israeli friends seem to feel in one way or another that I urge you to go read it.
She wrote another one, a couple of days later, with her recollections of the inter-communal confrontations inside Israel in October 2000 that left 13 Israelis of Palestinian ethnicity (whom she calls “Israeli Arabs”) and at least one Jewish Israeli person dead. Again, written from the heart and expressing an important take on those events. Read that one, too.
Then yesterday, she had a great little post with a link to an amazing web-based resource called “Grow a Brain” that has onward links on many topics Israeli and Middle Eastern.
So darn it, now I have to go into my Main Index Template yet again and take out that “irritatingly provincial” bit about her.
Finally, on a lighter note, this from my son Tarek in Boston, which he sent hoping it would bring “a smile for your day.”
I was just on the phone with him. I told him it reminded me of the time about 12 years ago that I took him and the other two kids to Normandy. I took some great pix of them clambering around on top of some of the old tanks that are there as part of the memorial of the D-Day landings. One of these pics I sent to my Dad in England, with a caption of something like “the triumph of youth over militarism.”
Now, my Dad had actually been on the Normandy beaches– he went over on about D-plus-4, I think. He told me a little sternly, “My dear,” he said (rocking back and forth on his heels– or am I only imagining that? JM, I miss you!) “–My dear, if it hadn’t been for people fighting in tanks like that you probably wouldn’t even have been here.”
Food for thought, yes. My personal take is that it may have been the US Civil War that was the hardest one for Quakers to take a pacifist position on….

Setbacks for the monarchs of spin

Lots happening that I’ve been wanting to blog about. First, a good discussion about the utility of war developing on the Comments board under the next post down: check it out.
Second, the emergence of details on the great story of how Colin Powell and the Pentagon brass out-maneuvered Rumsfeld and the neo-con Pentagon suits in order to get Washington to take the Iraq dossier back to the UN. A good story on this today in the Wash. Post
The story, by Dana Milbank and Thomas E. Ricks, starts off:

    On Tuesday, President Bush’s first day back in the West Wing after a month at his ranch, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell walked into the Oval Office to present something close to a fait accompli.
    In what was billed as a routine session, Powell told Bush that they had to go to the United Nations with a resolution seeking a U.N.-sanctioned military force in Iraq — something the administration had resisted for nearly five months. Powell, whose department had long favored such an action, informed the commander in chief that the military brass supported the State Department’s position despite resistance by the Pentagon’s civilian leadership. Bush and his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, whose office had been slow to embrace the U.N. resolution, quickly agreed, according to administration officials who described the episode.
    Thus was a long and high-stakes bureaucratic struggle resolved, with the combined clout of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department persuading a reluctant White House that the administration’s Iraq occupation policy, devised by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, simply was not working.
    The effort by Powell and the military began with a t

Not exactly “umbrage”

After yesterday’s quick post here on a topic Juan Cole had raised that seemed to me to equate participating in antiwar marches was the equivalent of “marching for Saddam”, Juan sent me a well-expressed and thoughtful e-mail in response. Then he put a reference to this discussion up onto his blog. Right down at the bottom of this post today, he wrote:

    Helena Cobban took umbrage at my saying originally “march to keep Saddam in power” because she felt it was a slur against anti-war protesters, implying that that was their goal. I wasn’t, however, talking about other people; I was talking about my own ethical stance. I knew for a fact that Saddam was not going to be overthrown by internal forces and that he was committing virtual genocide against people like the Marsh Arabs. For me, marching against the war would have been done in knowledge that it would result in Saddam staying in power. She wants me to apologize. I’m always glad to apologize. I don’t see what it costs you to say you are sorry about hurting someone’s feelings inadvertently. But I didn’t mean, in my own mind, what she read me to mean, in the first place. I think an anti-war position was ethically defensible; it just wasn’t the position I was comfortable with. I think it mattered, too, whether you actually knew and interacted with Iraqi Shiites and Kurds very much.

I am certainly happy to accept his explanation, viz., that he was talking about his own choices not anyone else’s. Maybe I’m overly sensitive. There have certainly been many slurs thrown around to that effect against opponents of the war.
I’m not so happy to be described as “taking umbrage”. I grew up in a family where people were constantly accusing others of “taking umbrage”. I take it to mean some kind of a passive-aggressive hissy-fit, which I think belittles the seriousness of the points that I raised. “Offense”, maybe I took. “Umbrage”, no.
Also, I notably didn’t ask Juan to apologize (though I gracefully accept the apology he offered.) I suggested he might want to enact a little remorse over the affair. A small point, maybe. But I am very interested in the mechanistics of how people get beyond differences, and I tend to think that a process of remonstrance/reproach followed by discussion, (preferably enacted) remorse, and then reintegration is more effective at building or repairing longterm relationships than the traditional western sequence of accusation, confession/apology, and forgiveness.
Anyway, back to the larger issue: I have known and interacted with many Iraqi Kurds and Shi-ites, though probably not as many or as closely as Juan. It was a terrible dilemma, fuguring out how to be effective as non-stakeholders (outsiders) in helping them throw off the yoke of Saddamist, authoritarian misrule. Just as it still is, regarding the people of Burma, or North Korea, or a number of other rights hell-holes around the world. Juan says he “knew for a fact” that Saddam wasn’t going to be overthrown by internal forces. I can’t be quite as definitive about that as he was; but certainly, it looked highly unlikely that that would happen anytime in the foreseeable future.
But he seems to assume it was internal rebellion– or externally launched war. That there was, in other words, no other alternative.
I wonder if he says that about North Korea or Burma?
Maybe I know war better than he does. I have lived as a mother of small kids through one, for a number of years. And I have studied wars and their tragic sequelae in a number of places throughout the Middle East and the rest of the world. My main conclusions? War is always (a) massively harmful to the rights and even lives of large civilian populations, and (b) unpredictable.
Now I happen to agree with Juan that, broadly speaking, it was unwise (and possibly also, given their level of terrorization, unfair) to insist that the Iraqi people should be left with the total responsibility of liberating themselves. But still, the only alternatives were not between war (= infliction of massive rights abuses from a distance) and doing nothing. If we ever come to a point in human affairs where those are the only choices, it’ll be a truly tragic day.
But no, there were other options available–theoretically, at least. So what we need to do is start working hard to persuade people to make those theoretical options a real possibility. Like my suggestion of having the UN create a robust UNMOVIC-style operation devoted to “monitoring, observing, and verifying” the compliance of various autocratic regimes with the UN’s own human-rights instruments. Or perhaps, through the rapid expansion and upgrading of something like the new Nonviolent Peaceforce.
Goodness! If human ingenuity can invent the atom bomb, theater missile defense systems, “Daisy Cutter” heavy ordnance, and all those other whizz-bang instruments of death and destruction, surely we can design and start implementing their nonviolent equivalents in short order– and for a fraction of the cost!
Meantime, I’m sure Juan won’t take amiss my reminding y’all of this: the casualty toll in Iraq continues to grow.