I just wanted to draw people’s attention (again?) to the blogs I link to here. Which are not many. There’s a phenomenon called ‘Blogrolling’ which means, I think, something like “I’ll link to your blog if you link to mine.” Well, I don’t do that. I just link to a handful of blogs that I think are really interesting.
Anyway, Yvette, who writes “A Taste of Africa” is the most wonderful, talented, sensitive blogger anywhere. Plus, she seems to be doing this amazing community-building work in Somaliland, a country that isn’t even really recognized as a country–sort of like Kosovo or Iraqi Kurdistan, except that Somaliland gets almost zero international attention and almost zero international funding. Which I think makes her blogging even more valuable. Plus, she takes fabulous pictures and– here’s where I get jealous– knows how to get them up on her blog in enjoyable form.
(I’ll learn one day… )
So last month, Yvette’s mom died, and she had to go back home to the Philipines to deal with all that. Then her Movable Type blog machine crashed on her… But now she is up again, on Blogger– in a template that will be VERY familiar to longtime readers of JWN!
And with some great photos of celebrations of World Refugee Day, in Hargeisa, the campital of Somaliland (I think). Go see them!!
Okay, next up we have Iraniangirl, who’s living through some pretty interesting times and in response to them seems suddenly to have become incredibly thoughtful and dare I say it mature? I think this post, from yesterday, is really worth reading.
Iraq war: who are the forgers?
The Christian Science Monitor– a paper that I’ve worked with since 1976 — has a really important piece today, in which it apologises for having last month run a piece based on documents that, it has now determined, are forgeries.
The docs in question were acquired by reporter Philip Smucker from disaffected Iraqi General Salah Abdel-Rasool, in Baghdad in early May. They alleged that the vociferously anti-war British MP George Galloway had received $10 million of Iraqi government funding over the past few years to help bolster a whitwash campaign for Saddam Hussein.
Forged documents? Why does this ring a bell?
The Niger/yellowcake forgeries, perhaps?
From what the CSM investigation revealed, the Rasool forgeries were of a considerably higher order of sophistication than the Niger/yellowcake ones. But this episode raises some really interesting questions. Who is producing all these forgeries, whose aim seems to have been to discredit leading opponents of the US-UK war effort, and to build public support for it in the west?
My first hunch would be the ever-untrustworthy Ahmed Chalabi. But since I would hate to smear someone’s reputation based on false accusations (unlike, of course, the authors of the Rasool forgeries), I think someone should launch a thorough investigation of this whole question.
Has there in fact been a conspiracy or network of conspiracies that has aimed to jerk the west into this war? Surely, we deserve to know.
I believe that both the Rasool forgery and the Niger/yellowcake forgery could provide leads that might clarify this issue. The leads on the Niger/yellowcake forgery are probably a little older at this point; though I don’t see many signs that they’ve been systematically followed up. Those low-grade so-called “documents” came to the Brits from the Italians? Or from the Germans? It all seems terribly vague.
Is anyone following this story up well?
But now, we have the much warmer trail of the Rasool forgeries to follow up.
According to today’s piece in the CSM, Rasool described himself as a closet anti-Saddamist and claimed he’d found them in the home of Saddam’s son Qusay Hussein.
(The latest CSM investigation, which is described in length in today’s article, reveals that though Smucker did not pay Rasool directly for the docs, he did make a separate payment of $800 to the general’s neighbor for doing some translating. In a pauperized place like Baghdad, that’s a LOT of money– and some of it just may have made its way back over the garden fence to Rasool… )
Where did Rasool actually get those docs from??? From the CSM’s description of them, the level of their sophistication/verisimilitude was such that it seems unlikely that Rasool produced them himself on a printing press in his back yard (though I suppose that, being a general, he could probably have stolen some of the relevant letterhead fairly easily.)
Some other fascinating clues, however, indicate the author of those docs was not very familiar with institutional practices inside the vast Saddam-era security bureaucracy… So maybe Rasool didn’t produce them himself, but merely agreed to pass them on to eager reporter Smucker on behalf of someone else. (It seems much of Baghdad was awash with former regime insiders trying to peddle docs to reporters in those days.)
So where did Rasool actually get them?? Can he identify the party who gave them to him??
No indication that CSM follow-up reporter Ilene Prusher tried to pursue those questions… But some good shoe-leather work on this lead may well lead into the heart of a much bigger pro-war campaign based on misinformation (regarding WMDs, in general), lies, and forgeries.
Ending cycles of violence
I just got done writing my mid-June column for Al-Hayat… It’s one I’ve been thinking about for many days. Maybe as a sort of slightly philosophical commentary on the resurgence of violence in Palestine/Israel. Anyway, the idea is to take some of what I was looking at and discussing on my recent Africa trip, in terms of trying to figure out what it is that permits a serious peace negotiation to (1) start and then (2) succeed.
The main two examples of that that I looked at were, of course Mozambique and South Africa. In Rwanda, the outcome was notably NOT negotiated; and has anyway been less successful.
Well, mainly in the column, I wrote about South Africa. And since that won’t come out for another 10 days or so, I can’t write much about it here. (Buy the paper!) But there were also a few interesting and relevant things that I learned in Mozambique, that I didn’t have time to write about there…
End of a busy weekend
I’ve been working like the proverbial blue-arsed fly for nearly the whole weekend. Friday, I drove up to DC for the memorial service (gathering?) for my dear and recently departed old friends Jean and Richard Van Wagenen. It was really poignant. Richard had been my Dad’s best friend during WW2 when they worked in Military Intelligence together liaising with each other on behalf of their respective national armies. When he died last month, it really felt to me like the end of an important link with my father’s generation.
When I moved to DC as the single parent of two small kids, in 1982, Richard and Jean were like surrogate parents for me, and surrogate grandparents for the kids. Jean died the day after Thanksgiving.
Yesterday (Sat.), I started out with high hopes that it would be fun to take part in a once-a-week training program for the C’ville Women’s 4-Miler, which is coming up at the end of August. I can already run four miles, however, and do it from time to time as a stretch on my usual 3-mile run. And the program seemed designed for total neophytes. Plus it was extremely rah-rah. I told my friend Beverly whom I was sitting next to on the bleachers as the rah-rahs were progressing, “I think I’m too English for this.”
More on Israel’s assassins
Friend Judy S sent me the URL for an interesting examination of the degree to which Israel’s policy of extra-judicial executions (a.k.a. assassinations) has affected/stimulated the development of similar policies by the UK and the US. I don’t know anything about the writer, Richard Bennett. But he seems to present a LOT of information and I can’t imagine someone would do this in the public media, on such a sensitive subject, without being pretty sure of his sources.
On another note, my old friend Tom Friedman has a fairly good piece on the Israeli assassins issue in today NYT. His main point is that– regardless of whether Israel has the “right” to undertake such killings, or not– the policy seriously undercuts the chances for peace by strengthening the Palestinian hardliners of Hamas.
Is Tom assuming there that Sharon actually wants peace? No, he doesn’t seem to be doing that. (Hey, Tom was in Beirut in the summer of 1982. He has a pretty good take on Sharon.)
But he does pull his punches in a couple of significant ways. First, by not even mentioning the possibility that maybe Sharon and his cronies might actually want to undercut the chances for peace? Second, by not specifying just how many Palestinians have died in these gruesome and deliberate acts of (totally illegal) killing.
According to recent figures from the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, whose work is very carefully done and whose director, Raji Sourani, is a man of huge integrity, no fewer than 243 Palestinians had been killed in assination operations between the beginning of the current intifada and June 3, 2003. (Of course, the number has risen substantially since then.) Of the 243, “at least 90 (37% of the total number of killed in assassinations) were bystanders, of whom 31 (13%) were children.”
Okay, so we assume that “only” 90 of those killed in those operations were bystanders. Then 153 of them were in some way connected with Palestinian militant groups.
Tom F, in his piece, writes, “Have you noticed how often Israel kills a Hamas activist and the victim is described by Israelis as “a senior Hamas official” or a ‘key operative’? This has led me to wonder: How many senior Hamas officials could there be? We’re not talking about I.B.M. here. We’re talking about a ragtag terrorist group. By now Israel should have killed off the entire Hamas leadership twice. Unless what is happening is something else, something I call Palestinian math: Israel kills one Hamas operative and three others volunteer to take his place, in which case what Israel is doing is actually self-destructive.”
Well, by that token, then Israel’s deliberate killing of 153 Palestinian militants would have persuaded 459 of their friends to step up and take their places.
I disagree with quite a few things Tom writes. (What else is new?) But it’s certainly worthwhile to see him hammering home the essential point that, “The fact is, Ariel Sharon’s two years of using the Israeli Army alone to fight terrorism have not made Israelis more secure.”
Israel’s history of assassinations
Great piece by Jackson Diehl in today’s Washington Post.
In it, he details how in each of June 2001 and December 2001– though he erroneously referred to this having happened Dec 2002– American diplomacy had seemed to be successful in winning a ceasefire in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and then the Israeli security forces heated things up again by undertaking one of their ‘assassination specials’ against the Palestinians…
Not that June 2001 was the first time that had happened, either.
The record goes back at least as far October 1995, when Rabin’s security forces assassinated Fathi Shiqaqi, of Islamic Jihad. Then the Mossad (when Peres was PM) took out Hamas’s Yahya Ayyash, in January 1996.
Both those assassinations were undertaken at times when the Israeli political echelon was also trying to effect a breakthrough in the peace process. (Actually, that could make it a little different from Sharon’s use of assassinations, which is much more widespread and also not necessarily linked to any engagement in peacemaking that is anything like as serious as Rabin’s and Peres’s engagement in that 1995-96 period.)
Details of the 1995-96 assassinations, by the way, are in my 2000 book on the Syrian-Israeli peace talks of 1991-96.
But still, as Diehl demonstrates in his piece, this matter has a significant history.
Sometime, when I have time, I’d like to write more about how I see Sharon’s motivations and maneuvering in all this.
One key point to note is the “appeasement of domestic critics of the peace process aspect.” It’s NOT necessarily the case that, when ordering such assassinations, Israeli leaders have a clear and visionary idea of how this plays into the peacemaking. It’s not even– as Diehl seems to indicate– that they do it precisely in order to torpedo the peace process. In my view, it’s more like they do it as a cheap and unthinking way to appease their domestic critics and reassure them that they are “still security hawks”.
What that totally neglects, however, is the quite illegal nature of such killings. Their quite inhumane effects– especially when carried out in crowded places!! And of course, their effect on the continued re-radicalization of the Palestinian street.
Even given the very best interpretation of Rabin’s or Peres’s or Sharon’s motives– that is, the “explanation” that they themselves give for these actions: that is, that they are designed to weaken the Palestinian hardliners and empower the Palestinian moderates– can’t they see that it just doesn’t work that way???
Also, how extremely patronizing and de-humanizing can you be, to think that swooping in to kill Palestinian hardliners is going to “help” Abu Mazen.
Harley-size cycle of violence
Well, my timing really stinks. Not the first time that the story has majorly changed between deadline-time for my column, and the time of its appearing. (And probably, given the lead-times involved, not the last.)
You can see the column of mine that appeared today in the CSM by clicking here. I wrote it Sunday, did a last-over edit late Tues evening. Just after that, I guess, all heck broke loose.
Maybe I should have seen it coming? Already, Tuesday, IDF attack helicopters had killed five in Gaza (but not the prominent Hamas pol they were aiming for, Abdel-Aziz Rantissi). Actually, I had put a quick ref to that event in an edit I did Tues afternoon, but the copy-editor took it out for lack of space.
Then Wednesday came the big bus-bomb in Jerusalem…
Bush angry with Sharon?
So maybe Sharon really did piss W off last week, at Aqaba, as Akiva Eldar reported in HaAretz today?
Here’s what Reuters reported this afternoon, about Bush’s reaction to the Israeli government’s attempt to launch yet another extra-judicial killing yesterday. (The attempt failed. The target, Hamas’s Abdel-Aziz Rantissi, escaped with minor injuries. Two other people were killed, and a further number injured.)
Anyway, Reuters:
In a rare criticism of Israel, Bush said the attack on the official of the Hamas group could undermine efforts by Palestinians to end anti-Israeli violence, as specified in his peace “road map.”
He directed his top aides make phone calls to senior Israeli and Palestinian officials, urging the two sides to adhere to plan.
Bush did not take part in the calls.
“I’m concerned that the attacks will make it more difficult for Palestinian leadership to fight off terrorist attacks. I also don’t believe the attacks helped Israeli security,” Bush said as he met Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni in the Oval office.
“I am determined to keep the process on the road to peace and I believe that with responsible leadership by all parties we can bring peace to the region,” Bush told reporters.
Abdel-Aziz al-Rantissi of the Palestinian Hamas group, which has rejected the peace plan, was wounded in Tuesday’s strike by Israeli helicopter gunships. The strike killed two others, wounded 20 and threatened to sabotage the peace plan endorsed by Israeli and Palestinian leaders last week at a summit with Bush.
Bush said he regretted the loss of innocent life in the strike.
Another Israeli attack on Palestinian targets followed initial U.S. criticisms of the strike on Rantissi. The White House said it was still studying the second incident.
Under terms of the peace plan, the Palestinian Authority is responsible for ending anti-Israeli violence and dismantling groups such as Hamas that attack Israelis.
Asked whether Israel’s attack on Rantissi was “out of bounds of the road map,” White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said. “That’s correct.”
Iraqi scenarios
I went to a pre-lunch presentation on Iraq today given by our dear friend Adeed Dawisha. It was really good to see him. When he was last in Charlottesville, back last October, our conversation was a little stilted since he was a big supporter of Prez Bush’s war effort…
Well, our opinions on the advisability of launching that war still differ hugely, but now, there’s no point any more in arguing about it.
Regarding the present and future of Iraq– the country that Adeed grew up in– we can agree on some things and differ on others. So now at least, it’s easier to talk with him!
Adeed’s view of the present situation and future prospects in Iraq is considerably rosier than mine. Though I noted that it is now not nearly as rosy as the kind of scenario he sketched out when he was here back in October.
He and his spouse Karen Dawisha also had an article in the May-June issue of Foreign Affairs, in which they argued that there are some fairly good prospects for the establishment– or re-establishment, as they claim– of democracy in Iraq.
In that article, they argued that two major assets Iraq has that will help build democracy there are (1) a large and well-educated middle class, and (2) a history of pluralism in the pre-Saddam era.
He made part of that same argument today. Well, the part about the middle class.
Personally, I’m a bit wary of that argument. It seems to spring from a generally unexamined classist kind of fallacy that people elsewhere who are “of the same class as us” will therefore end up thinking like us.
One thing I’ve learned from my close study of Lebanese and Palestinian society is that people who are bulwarks of the middle class– educated people, people of generally conservative social and economic views– in those societies don’t necessarily end up thinking like Jeffersonian democrats. In fact, they often end up being bulwarks of Islamist movements.
It was actually Ziad Abu Amr– Abu Mazen’s present emissary to Hamas– who pointed out to me when we were doing research together in Palestine back in the late 1980s that it was his best students from Bir Zeit University who would tend to gravitate toward Hamas and Islamic Jihad. That is, the students who stuck to their books, studied hard and effectively (and didn’t spend time running after girls, etc etc)– and who then went on to become very solid middle-class members of many different professions.
I think the ones who were less studious, more easily distractable, would be the ones who’d end up in the secular nationalist organizations.
And I’ve also noted the same phenomenon in Lebanon.
People in the west tend to have these stereotypical views of people of Islamist political leanings that they are all (1) wild-eyed radicals from the poorest segments of society, and (2) dyed-in-the-wool misogynists. I know for a fact that (1) is not true. And I’m open to entertaining a more nuanced view of things regarding (2)…
So even if, as Adeed claimed this morning, the benevolent occupation forces in Iraq (!) can succeed in getting people there back to work, and then the middle class will find its social and political footing there once again– well, according to Adeed, this would instantly make democracy a much more likely outcome. Myself, I’m not nearly as certain that this is so. (Nor, actually, am I certain about any of the antecedent logical steps in that argument.)
In this amazingly prescient post that I wrote on April 12 (from Tanzania), I wrote:
“People cannot live without personal safety, and this requires some form–whatever form it may be!– of public order. The Americans are not so far providing it. They seem to have made little provision for doing so… In the north– and I mean that term in a fairly expansive sense– the Kurdish forces look poised, perhaps, to provide public order… In the rest of the country, I would place a strong bet on some of the Shi-ite religious organizations being well-placed to provide the public order that the people need… “
Hey, did I call it, or what?
Anyway, one other last note from the morning’s session before I get up to go out to dinner with Karen and Adeed–
This is definitely the “oldster” crowd that gathers there at the Miller Center for Public Affairs for their mid-morning discussions. (Good for the no-night-driving crowd.) At 50 yrs old, I was probably the third youngest person in a room of some 40-50 people. But it’s a crowd that includes a lot of smart, well-informed people.
In the 35-minutes-plus of discussion that followed Adeed’s presentation about Iraq, the words “Weapons of Mass Destruction” and “Ahmad Chalabi” did not come up once.
I think this tends to confirm my suspicion that the WMD issue (as in, who was it who by grossly inflating the size of the WMD threat jerked us into this war, anyway?) may not really develop political legs unless things go visibly very badly for the US occupation force in Iraq.
As for Ahmad Chalabi– boy, has he ever dropped off the map! Justifiably so, I think.
And of the other former heroes of the Iraqi exile– whatever happened to Rend Francke?? She’s the head of the (pro-democracy) Iraq Foundation in DC. When I last heard about her, Caryle Murphy was quoting her in the Washington Post— must have been February, maybe– as saying she planned to be aboard the first of the US tanks that entered Baghdad!!!!
Has anyone heard anything of her since?
Heavy work zone ahead
I spent much of Thursday and Friday doing family stuff, what with Lorna’s graduation, etc. Today after seeing Joe and Tarek off, I pulled out an essay I needed to finish today: a contribution that World Scientific Publishing and Dr. Irwin Abrams solicited from me, to go into a big book on “Impacts and Consequences of the Iraq War”.
Well, that’s the tentative title of the book. WSP has some special deal with the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm to publish the Nobel Prize acceptance speeches of all the Laureates, and they and Abrams are soliciting contributions to this volume from Nobel Peace Laureates and “eminent scholars”.
Guess that makes me an “eminent scholar”?
So I worked on that for much of the day. It’s near completion. Tomorrow I need to start sketching out my CSM column for my regular slot upcoming Thursday. Monday, I need to plunge back into the work of redrafting the report of the International Quaker Working Party on Israeli-Palestinian Peace– the group that gathered back together a fortnight ago in Philly. I’ve set myself a tight schedule for this redraft.
Here’s the thing, though. In my CSM column this week, can I bring myself to write in favor of W for the moves he’s been making on Israeli-Palestinian peace?
Yes, I reckon I need to. Just as well I have internalized a lot of that Christian teaching about separating the sinner from the sin, and the Buddhist/Christian teaching about giving everyone a chance of future redemption. Because otherwise I would still be pretty angry at Bush about the war on Iraq, and unable to give him the credit that I think he is due for his most recent activism on Palestinian-Israeli peace.
Sure, I know it’s not everything I’d like for him to do. But the fact he’s even gone this far is, frankly, a welcome surprise for me.
Earlier in the week–or was it last week?– I wrote a column for Al-Hayat in which I laid out the arguments why engaged activism on Israeli-Palestinian activism might actually be politically beneficial for Bush at this point in the electoral cycle. And what with Iraq rapidly going down the tubes (from the US perspective), and whatever.
But I wrote that stuff– this was quite a few days before the Sharm or Aqaba summits– almost as an intellectual exercize. That was, intellectually I could see the arguments I was making, but I still didn’t really believe some of it might happen.
And then, it seemed to start doing so.
So, we’ll have to continue with a “watchful waiting” routine as we monitor W’s moves on this score from here on out. But meanwhile, I really do want to continue to give him encouragement to proceed.
I know, too, that there are threats to the “Roadmap” process from a number of directions. The Israeli settlers are hugely upset at what they see as Sharon’s defection. (Check out this revealing interview from Friday’s Haaretz with dyed-in-the-wool Likudnik Ruby Rivlin.) Hamas is upset that Abu Mazen seems to have been giving ways too much away already. (If anyone can resolve the current Hamas-Abu Mazen problem it’s probably my old buddy the Palestinian Culture Minister Ziad Abu Amr, who’s their main go-between these days. Good luck, Ziad!)
… And then, there are all the intrinsic problems of the Roadmap itself, which replicates many of the weaknesses of the old Oslo process. Particularly the rampant indeterminacy of the outcome.
But who knows? In the interview with Ruby Rivlin, RR warns eloquently that once Sharon gets tied into the negotiations, the process may go further than even he, that sly old war-horse (my words, re Sharon), is able to control.
I’m not totally convinced of that. And yet, and yet… Things like that actually do end up happening in negotiations. One thing I heard in South Africa was that the National Party there had entered the negotiations with the ANC still fairly confident it could win a settlement that would involve only minor concessions– but they ended up granting full enfranchisement to an electorate that then rejected them roundly at the polls…
So how can we empower the many people–in Israel as well as the Palestinian community– who in any fair process of popular consultation would end up, as repeated polls have told us is the current balance of attitudes, voting for a decent, viable two-state outcome??
How do we get to that process of popular consultation? How do we start promulgating the definition and the vision of that outcome?
Good questions. Maybe I can use that in the column. Read Thursday’s CSM to find out!