MORE ON OCCUPATIONS– JAPAN AND IRAQ: What I forgot to mention in my earlier long screed on comparative occupation-ology was that there’s a great article by the historian of modern Japan John Dower, in the current issue of Boston Review in which he elegantly and to my view convincingly debunks the idea that we can make a meaningful analogy between what the American occupation of Japan achieved and what we might expect the American occupation of Iraq to achieve.
(In that same issue, there’s also my piece on Syria and the prospect of democratization, and a good piece by Neta Crawford on pre-emption.)
MILITARY OCCUPATIONS: THE GOOD, THE
MILITARY OCCUPATIONS: THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE POSSIBLY UGLY: Okay, George Bush has set us on the path of war, and in the days ahead Iraqi people, Iraqi conscripts, the fighting members of the all-volunteer US and British armies and numerous other human groups near and far from the battlefield have, as a consequence, been put squarely in harm’s way.
I, of all people, don’t want to elide that fact.
However, soberly speaking, there is every prospect from what we know that the US military will “prevail” militarily. So it is really important to start looking at what comes next…
Earlier today, I wrote an incredibly long post that surveyed various military occupations over the past 60 years, judging which seemed to have worked well, and which not… For the whole text of that post, go here. And this was my bottom line:
Which leaves us as Americans where?
Paying the cost of this occupation ourselves. And we can ask the Israelis how high those costs might be.
FINALLY GOT THE INDEX HERE
FINALLY GOT THE INDEX HERE FIXED?? I still can’t figure what was wrong with the coding Blogger and I had put into the archives for the past couple of weeks, but I went into the HTML and there were some really nasty extra characters in there… I cleaned it up by hand (being a good housewife, heh-heh-heh) and now I think the index WORKS.
Please, friends, tell me if you try it and it doesn’t.
Also, if anyone can figure how or why those extra characters got into the archives there, and how I could prevent that happening in the future– please let me know!!! Thanks!
SO IT’S STARTED: The 17-year-old
SO IT’S STARTED: The 17-year-old just broke the news to me about the bombing having started. I clicked onto CNN.com. “Mommy?” she said, hanging round my door in her bath-robe. I said, “D’you want a hug?” “No… aw, yes then.”
We hugged. “I mean,” she said, “I feel a lot, lot worse for other people.”
“Yup. But you know what, I’m afraid the world we’re going to be handing over to you and your lot will be a far worse world for everyone, you included. I’m really, really sorry ’bout that. Sorry we screwed up– ”
“Did you feel that way, Mom? When you were my age?”
“No, really I didn’t. When I was your age I felt the world my Dad and his generation were handing over was pretty secure, all in all.”
“Mom?”
“Yes?”
“It’s okay. You know, I think you and Dad did your best– ”
“Yeah, well, we still screwed up.”
A QUAKER SALUTE TO SOLDIERS
A QUAKER SALUTE TO SOLDIERS IN NASIRIYAH: My friend Rick McCutcheon is a Canadian Quaker. In 2000-2001, he and his wife Tamara Fleming served as joint field representatives to Iraq for Quaker and Mennonite service bodies. In the March 2003 issue of The Canadian Friend, Rick has published a recollection of one particularly poignant encounter he had with an Iraqi military unit. I’ll post the start of the piece here, with the permission of both Rick and The Canadian Friend:
A Quaker Salute to Soldiers in Nasiriyah, by Richard McCutcheon
There is a town about 375 kilometers south of Baghdad called Nasiriyah. Tamara and I came to love it while we lived in Iraq, and traveled there several times. Those familiar with the Bible may know it by its biblical name, Ur, the place where Abraham is said to have lived for about 65 years. Someday, when times are different, we have talked about going back to live in Nasiriyah — just to live with and learn from the people there. To get acquainted, perhaps, with the works of Haboobi, the patron poet of the city, whose statue stands in the center of the round-about in the heart of the town.
Nasiriyah is located on the banks of the Euphrates river. The Al-Janoob Hotel, where we stayed whenever we visited Nasiriyah, is on the road that runs along the river. When you exit the front door of the hotel, walk across the road, and pass through a small park not more than 10 meters across, you come to a paved promenade with a low wall running along the river bank. It is a short hop over the wall and down to the water’s edge. It’s truly a beautiful spot — I see it in my mind’s eye this very moment
as I write this sitting at my desk.
One morning I woke up quite early. Sleep wouldn’t come to me, so I thought I might as well get up. I happen to be an avid amateur photographer. The idea — perhaps rooted in some romantic notion of the Euphrates — came to me to go down to the water’s edge in the early pre-dawn light to take a picture of the river. I knew that this was not something that I was supposed to do — that is, to go out on my own, especially in a southern town known for its anti-government tendencies. In retrospect, I might have got the government official who traveled with us into trouble, not to mention my wife and I. But I went ahead and got dressed, slung my old Nikon camera over my shoulder, and headed for the river…
Read the rest here.
THE EFFECT OF THIS WAR
THE EFFECT OF THIS WAR ON IRAN: Juan R. Cole, who’s probably the best informed, sanest, and most articulate person around who writes on Iran, has given me permission to use the following assessment, penned March 17, on JWN. I should add that for his day job, Cole’s a distinguished Professor of History at the University of Michigan.
It seems to me that the likely scenario in Iran after an American Iraq war is … that it will rehabilitate nativism and anti-imperialism and help restore the popularity of the hardliners. While one cannot know for sure, it is even possible that the good performance of the conservatives in Tehran’s municipal elections was already in at least small part a sign of public concern about a return to U.S. hegemony.
When the US was far away, Khamenei’s anti-Washington rhetoric sounded increasingly old-fashioned and from another era. With GIs stomping all over Shiite Iraqi areas with large boots, occasionally shooting Shiites, and being in charge of the shrines at Najaf and Karbala, the potential for the US to give offense to Shiite Iranians is manifold. One could imagine enraged Revolutionary Guards slipping over the border to hit US troops, and an escalating series of reprisals and counter-reprisals.
Iranians have been politically mobilized during the past 25 years, and cannot be expected to react to such events sanguinely. Some young people may initially welcome the idea of greater US presence in the area, but that is likely to get old fast (remember a lot of Shiites in Lebanon at first thought the idea of an Israeli invasion in 1982 was a good one).
The hawks in Washington have failed to come to terms with mass political mobilization as a factor in decolonization. Their basic philosophy is that non-European peoples are easily led and easily fooled. It was the philosophy of the British Viceroys of India in the 1930s and 1940s, and of Anthony Eden and David Ben-Gurion in the 1950s and it was false. (Its falseness is even demonstrated by the hawks’ recent humiliating failures in diplomacy at the UN and among world publics). Neocolonial arrangements can sometimes be made with fair success via local proxies, but whenever the veil slips too much and the hegemony becomes revealed as foreign domination, there is trouble. I don’t think the American planners of post-war Iraq, who are both incredibly arrogant and incredibly ignorant of history, understand the need for a light touch. And I don’t think Iran will react well to a heavy hand.
BUSH CONVERTS TO KEYNESIANISM– JUST
BUSH CONVERTS TO KEYNESIANISM– JUST NOT FOR DOMESTIC CONSUMPTION? Among the many unseemly and downright scandalous aspects of this war (which I need not list here), one of the most distasteful has been the spate of reports that the administration is already preparing to hand out large contracts to large U.S. firms, to engage in the “post-war reconstruction” of Iraq.
In a good piece in today’s NYT, Elizabeth Becker quotes unnamed administration officials as saying the administration is already offering $1.5 billion-worth of contracts to private US companies– and just $50 million to not-for-profit US groups like Save the Children– while bypassing the many highly experienced multilateral relief and development organizations almost completely.
“Administration officials,” she writes, “said it was important to give contracts to American corporations… as a way to demonstrate to the Iraqi people that the United States is a ‘liberator’ bringing economic prosperity and democratic institutions to their nation.”
How’s that again? Oh, now it’s clear. The Iraqis, being “simple, ignorant souls”, will presumably have forgotten at that point which foreign power it was that just weeks or days previously had bombed their infrasructure to smithereens. “Relief work,” Becker quotes her sources as telling her, “will begin almost as soon as the first bombs are dropped and the military is confronted with Iraqi civilians in need of food, water, medicine and shelter.”
Alert readers can probably guess the kinds of companies that have been invited to submit bids. Yes, there’s Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown Root on the list, along with Bechtel and many others of the “usual suspects.”
To add perspective to her story, Becker uses some quotes from Frances Cook, a woman who was previously US Ambassador to Oman and is now a consultant to several Middle Eastern companies. Cook’s been lobbying (why am I not surprised) for Middle Eastern companies to get some of the contracting action.
But actually, the points she makes are fair enough. “They are already screaming in the Middle East– you call us corrupt, look at you giving contracts to American companies and no one else,” she is quoted as saying.
Yes, it does all leave a very nasty taste in the mouth, doesn’t it? First the Bushies get to gratuitously bomb the country to bits. And then, almost immediately, they sweep in as “liberators”, asking for laurel wreaths and a welcome mat because they’re handing out contracts to Halliburton to come and fix the plumbing.
Elision alert! Elision alert! Did anyone hear a swish as one of the Horseman of the Apocalypse rode through there? He was in there somewhere, I swear.
So yes, distasteful. But maybe there’s another way to look at it? Couldn’t this be the ultimate Keynesian scheme? After all, the British economic guru had famously recommended someplace that, given that government spending is such an effective stimulant for the general economy, it might well make sense for the government to hire one set of workers to dig holes in the streets, and another set to come by the next day and fill them in…
Of course, the Bushies would probably rather die than admitting to being Keynesians. John Maynard Keynes– whose theories helped inspire the New Deal and who networked personally to help bring about the creation of the World Bank– advocated economic policies directly contrary to the Bushies’ favored cure-all of tax cuts for the rich…
And the administration is notably not proposing any plans to have these same companies come into US cities and regions and undertake the kinds of large-scale infrastructure-development projects that so much of the country needs…
So could we see this entire war-in-Iraq thing as a big Keynesian dig-and-fill-up-the-holes project?
Nah. On a horrible day like today, even cute humor doesn’t work. War still stinks. It has no redeeming value whatsoever and will only cause further waves of violence to ricochet down through history. Unless, G-d help us all, we can all get a grip and step out of this paradigm of violence and counter-violence.
BLAMING THE FRENCH: This seems
BLAMING THE FRENCH: This seems to be one of the slightly underhanded tactics that’s emerged from the Trio Con Brio summit over the weekend. It was certainly a fairly strong theme in Bush speech tonight. And there’s buzz from London that Blair might try to exploit the anti-French prejudice that’s still strong in the UK to shore up his very shaky position.
The main gist of the argument is that it’s the fault of the French that the Anglo-Saxon warriors didn’t get their eminently sensible, eminently flexible etc resolution through the Security Council. That if those darn’ Frenchies hadn’t had “the Gaul” (sorry about that) to announce their veto upfront, all those members of the putatively saleable six would have come singing along to Foggy Bottom for their respective payoffs, and the Anglo-Saxons would at least have gotten the “moral victory” of a strong-majority vote of nine members for the Blair/Bush resolution in the SC, even if the vote did not in the end prove veto-proof.
I think this argument is as weak and dishonest as many of the other arguments the warhawks have come up with over recent months. First, it relies on an unproven assumption that Angola, Cameroon, Chile, etc, could all have been bought. Baloney. As I wrote before here, the French looked set to do pretty well with the three African SC members. And by all accounts, the Chileans were pretty well pissed by the news accounts of NSA SIGINT operations at the UN that raised all their engrained fears that US intelligence agencies were once again interfering in their country’s democratic processes…
Secondly, this argument makes it seem like it was grossly unfair of the French to have showed their hands even before the vote was taken. Well, grow up. There were two dozen or more SC draft resolutions from the Reagan era on that sought to curb some of Israel’s excesses in the Occupied Territories, that the U.S. vetoed— and in many of those cases it had announced its intention to veto very early during the negotiations. For some of those resolutions, the US ‘no’ vote stood quite alone, against 14 ‘yes’ votes.
So if, on something they feel very strongly about, the French– whose veto in the UN is every bit as “legitimate” as Washington’s– should choose to use the veto, and to announce their intention to do so fairly early on– well, that’s how the game gets played in the security Council… Or it did, until recently.
Plus, of course, did I mention that the US has wielded its veto far, far more frequently over the years than have the French.
I’ve increasingly had the feeling that the whole UN process has been at best a diversion for the Bushies, while at worst they have been quite prepared to hold it hostage and threaten its viability as they’ve girded up for their fight-to-the-death against Saddam. Many of the Bushies and their supporters have expressed open contempt for the organization and have seemed openly gleeful that it has “proved” (to them, at least) its dysfunctionality this time, yet again.
It was Maureen Dowd who in her great March 5 column in the NYT, “What Would Genghis Do?”, revealed that in August 2001, the suits in the Pentagon commissioned a study of the strengths and weakness of previous stand-alone world empires… Well, if a new Anglo-Saxon “Rome” should emerge from the ashes of the ever-closer war, I know that I for one will want to line up with that feisty Gallic resistant, Asterix.
A RWANDAN PROTESTS: Heck, this
A RWANDAN PROTESTS: Heck, this is one of many things I meant to post recently but forgot to.
It’s from Isidore Munyeshyaka, who contributes to a Rwandan-affairs group I’m in. He was responding to Ari Fleischer’s invocation of the UN’s failure to act to prevent genocide in Rwanda in 1994 as a stick to beat the UN ’round the head and neck with, in order to help excuse bypassing the UN on attacking Iraq. (Also invoked: Kosovo.)
“Madeleine Albright who was then the US Representative at the UN lobbied the UN and urged it to treat the genocide of Tutsis as inter-ethnic massacres!” Isidore recalls, quite correctly. “While now to attack Irak, they have dispatched hundreds of thousands of
troops to the Gulf in preparation of the imminent war, they [the US government of that time] voted for scaling down the contigent of the then ‘toothless’ UNAMIR! in Rwanda.”
(Actually, I think it was worse than that. I seem to recall reading in Sam Powers’ excellent account of US decisionmking during those ghastly weeks of genocide that the Clinton administration was in favor of dismantling UNAMIR altogether. It was only the heroic commitment of Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian commander on the spot, that succeeded in keeping any elements of the force on the job at all. And those few hundred who did stay there– in contravention of Clinton and Albright’s clear policy directives– succeeded in saving thousands of lives of threatened Rwandans.)
“Bush and Blair — or any leader of the time — should feel ashamed,” Isidore wrote, “and should never evoke Rwanda to explain their unjustified war against the people of Irak!”
He ends up, unpacifically, “I wish hell and fire!” But you get the gist of his complaint, I’m sure.
On March 12, Gerald Caplan, the author of Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide, the report of an international panel that investigated the 1994 slaughter in Rwanda, published an article along exactly these same lines in the Toronto Globe & Mail. Read it here.
I guess I’d gotten used to the Bushies ignoring the facts, twisting the evidence, generally misusing the tools of reason in their drive to drive us into this war. But I think this attempt to exploit the tragic history of Rwanda for their own political ends marks a new low.
AZORES SUMMIT TEXT — THE
AZORES SUMMIT TEXT — THE ULTIMATE IN ELISION: The statement that the Trio Con Brio issued at the end of their Azores summit represents the highest form of elision: neither the word “war” nor any synonymous or similar terms is mentioned anywhere at all. The nearest the statement comes to mentioning anything as distasteful as war is “serious consequences”, as in “If Saddam refuses even now to cooperate fully with the United Nations [but wouldn’t you have thought that this is for the UNSC itself to decide, not three random member-states?], he brings on himself the serious consequences foreseen in UNSCR 1441 and previous resolutions.”
And then, moving right along here, we are taken straight to the never-never land of bounteous and trouble-free reconstruction: “In these circumstances, we would undertake a solemn obligation to help the Iraqi people build a new Iraq at peace with itself and its neighbors… ”
Whoosh! You never heard the “giddy-up” of one (or more) of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse as he/they rode along between the lines there, did you?