Just World News with Helena Cobban

WASHINGTONIANS REALLY ARE DIFFERENT: It’s been my surmise for some time now that people who live inside Washington’s infamous Beltway really are a different breed from the rest of us. This insight came to me roughly three minutes after our family moved here to Central Virginia– from Washington DC– in 1997.
Okay, maybe it took more than three minutes. But the point is, the two-and-a-half hour drive from DC to our city (Charlottesville) really does convey a person to a different kind of a place. In one of my Feb. 24 posts on JWN, I reflected a little on how traumatized many DC residents might well be at this point, what with not only 9/11 at the Pentagon, but also after that the anthrax scare, then the terrifying sniper scare… and on how maybe many of them, including the figure I (possibly inappropriately) deride as Bombs-away Don, are maybe acting more out of a sense of fear than one of possibility and hope…
And now, here come Richard Morin’s “Unconventional Wisdom” column in The Washington Post to prove my point. Washingtonians really are different from all the people I know who live elsewhere in this great republic… Different, too, I would venture to add, from all other peoples everywhere else throughout the world, with the possible exception of the Israelis.
In today’s column, Morin cites a WP survey of 600 randomly selected local residents, conducted “earlier this month”– meaning, presumably, February– as having found that, “about two in three were stockpiling water, food and batteries or taking other precautions such as designating a safe room in their homes, just as the government said we should.”
Two in three? That is truly staggering. I don’t know if anyone has any hard data from other cities. But I am pretty darn certain you wouldn’t find a figure anything like that high anyplace else in the country. Not even in New York.
(Morin’s piece also cited some of the survey’s findings re Washingtonians who had strengthened their arsenals as one of their responses to the heightened level of threat. “I got extra firearms and they are always loaded,” one 22-year-old Virginia woman told the survey-takers.)
So yes, those folks really do seem to need TLC more than anything else. I’m going up to DC next week, to take part in the International Women’s Day events for peace. Maybe we could take a bunch of teddy-bears to hand out to the beleaguered locals. Would that help them assuage their heightened fearfulness?
Any other ideas?

ONE WIN FOR THE GOOD GUYS: Yesterday, when I was cataloguing how badly things were going for the Bush administration, I confess I forgot to mention an important piece of good news. That was, the capture in Pakistan of Khalid Sheikh Muhammed, the guy described as Qaeda’s Chief Operating Officer. That certainly sounded like good news for the forces of sanity in the world, though we shouldn’t forget due-process rights and the presumption of this guy’s innocence until a court of law– and the rest of us– can actually see the case against him.
But it was a good development. It dealt directly with the issue of “bringing to justice” the alleged perpetrators of 9/11. It was made possible through solid police work, including “working” international alliances with the Pakistanis and others.
The war effort, however, is a completely different kind of endeavor on every score. And the sheer scale and chaotic consequences of this war will make small but significant victories like KSM’s arrest seem tiny by comparison.
Plus, all the indicators that I know of after studying the Middle East intensively for nearly 30 years are that the kind of war the Bushies are planning will incubate thousands more KSMs within weeks of its launching.

HOLY LAND CASUALTY TOLL: Almost every days now, there seem to be headlines about some new incursion of Israeli armor, or attack by Israeli helicopters, in one or another part of the Gaza Strip, or in Nablus or Hebron.
When I was in Israel last summer, many Israelis warned that if Prez Bush launched a “big” war against Iraq, then Sharon might well be tempted to launch his own mirror-image of it against either the Palestinians, the Lebanese, or the Syrians. And of these, of course, the Palestinians, being only very lightly armed and not having a state to protect them, make the easiest prey. The thrusts and parries that the IDF have been undertaking against various Palestinian neighborhoods could be Sharon’s equivalent of the kinds of “softening-up and probing” exercizes that the US forces have been stepping up in recent weeks, against the Iraqi forces in and around the “no-fly zones.”
I’ve been trying to track the casualty figures in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. They are certainly NOT as high as they were at the height of the rampage Sharon launched there last March and April (489 Palestinians killed in the OPTs in those two months, of whom 47 were minors.)
According to the Israeli Center for Human Rights, B’tselem, between Jan and March 26 this year, 114 Palestinians have been killed in the OPTs (including 15 minors), while 2 have been killed by Israeli civilians. 11 Israeli security personnel have been killed by palestinians in the OPTs in that time, as have 2 Israeli civilians.
Meanwhile inside Israel, 15 Israeli civilians (none recorded as minors) and 2 members of the Israeli security forces have been killed by Palestinians, while 5 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli security people.
The number of Palestinians listed as “killed by the Israeli security forces” does NOT include those who lose their lives as a result of the delays that may be either imposed on ambulances by Israeli checkpoints, or that result from sick people not being able to reach ambulances because of the barricades and trenches around all palestinian population centers.
In general, the trend of Palestinians being killed has remained fairly stable– though shockingly high!– over the past 10 months, while the trend of Israeli casualties has gone down. But watch for the latest numbers, and get some other really fascinating detail from B’tselem’s website. Those folks, who sincerely care about every human life whatever the “nationality” of its bearer, are truly worth their weight in rubies.

A PURRTY BAD COUPLE OF DAYS: Yes, things have been a little challenging around our household for the past couple of days. The dog has a slipped disc in her long foxhound’s back and has been very needy. Yesterday, we were still digging our way out of the latest 48-hour-long snowstorm to dump its load over Central Virginia. And today, the 17-year-old daughter fainted, fell against a dresser, and ended up needing 30 stitches in her face, poor lass…
But whenever I think things are tough around our household, I just think of all the catastrophes that George W. Bush and his “family” of close of advisors are facing these days. Here are just some of them:
— Saddam went ahead and started demolishing his Samoud-2 missiles
— That helped convince key Security Council players, especially Russia, to line up more firmly than expected against the US-Brit resolution
— The Turkish parliament failed to pass a vote allowing US forces to us Turkey as a staging-area for the assault on Iraq
— The Kurds (who had already been sold down the river in the interest of “getting Ankara on board”) continued their very public whining about Washington’s policy
— So did other exiled Iraqi oppositionists
— Bush’s own spooks are publicly warning that North Korea could go critical “in the next few weeks” on producing weapons-grade plutomium
— The Philippino government says (like the Turks) that it may not be as easy as Bombs-away Don thought it would be, to have U.S. troops fighting on their national soil…
— etc etc.
In fact, just about the only good news for the Washington hawks is the continued evidence of total disarray amongst the Arab leaders, who are demonstrating for all the world to see that they are not about to stymie Washington’s war plans. (Though how their subjects might react to the rulers’ ineptitude in the face of a threat to the Arab heartland is anyone’s guess. All Arabs, leaders and citizens, are well aware of the fallout that befell inept and compromised Arab leaders in the years after 1948.)
But anyway, back to Bush. Here’s my question. When the going gets a little tough in my household, or in any of the other endeavors I’m engaged in, I think I generally have a fairly realistic idea that, this particular week, things ain’t going so good.
But for Dubya– do you think he knows? What kind of cognitive processes are we talking about here? What kinds of conceptual or experiential yardsticks do you think he reaches for, when someone tells him, “Sir, Country X or Y seems to be having a little difficulty falling into line with our plan”?
Come to think of it, do you think that he even runs the kind of administration where his advisors would feel confident enough to come forward and tell him that currently the news is looking pretty bad?
This stuff is deeply, deeply scary. Maybe prayer really is the best thing we can do?
But in the mean-time, I’m helping to organize some turnout from Charlottesville for the March 8 women’s antiwar events in DC. Gotta do whatever we can.

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH WATCH: Today, I participated via speakerphone in a lengthy meeting of the HRW Middle East Advisory Committee. It’s an admirably diverse group of people. Perhaps a little too diverse? At one recent meeting, a member started talking with anguish about the situation faced by her Israeli friend, “who lives in a settlement– well of course I mean a neighborhood really, and anyway it’s one of those places that, well, definitely will stay attached to Israel under a final peace agreement… ”
Being Human Rights Watch, everyone there was far too polite to remind this person– a member of our committee– of the portion of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention that states, “The Occupying Power shall not… transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” Or of the fact that an infraction of this article is specifically described as “grave breach” of the Convention, that is a war crime.
So there our fellow committee member was, begging for sympathy for the voluntarily chosen situation of someone who is certainly the beneficiary of a war crime, and quite likely also an accessory to it.
If the friend wants to live in the same security that everyone on earth of course deserves, then maybe she could think of foreswearing the subsidized lifestyle, expropriated land, and many other benefits that are given to Israeli settlers? She could even join the many other brave Israelis who still, even in these times, continue to fight to end the entire settlement project…
But no. Apparently she wants to continue sitting where she is, enjoying someone else’s land, and have our sympathy too.

MORE ABOUT BRIDGES: In the Ikezawa e-book (see next post), one of the things I liked– and would have liked more of– was the specificity of the details he gave about what he saw in Iraq. That’s one of the things I really like about the “Dear Raed” blog that I read every so often.
I like the edgy attitude of the folks who write that blog– from Baghdad. And I also love their detail. I’ve seen a couple of lengthy posts from Salam, who’s one of the people who posts on it, in which he writes with affection and knowledge about different parts of his city (and of Basra, in the south.) See his post of Feb. 24– that was a good one.
Feb 21, he wrote, “it is warmer generally and the nights are beautiful with a bright moon when you can see it thru the clouds or sand. The moon started waning now and getting closer to that scary ‘dark of the moon’ phase. Most people think if anything is going to happen this month it will start during the darkest nights. We?ll see.”
A blog like this can truly be a bridge across the continents.
I’m looking for a similar kind of a blog written from Israel— one that portrays some of the distinctive flavor, general zaniness, and existential fearsomeness of what it’s like to live there. So far, all I’ve found by Googling on “Israel blog” have been some fairly stridently nationalistic ones, and a rather sad one from a peacenik who apparently gave up doing it in despair sometime last summer.
If anyone has some good ideas for how to find one, please tell me!

JAPAN, IRAQ, BRIDGES: In Quaker meeting the other day, a very vivid image came to me of the Ai-oi Bridge in the center of Hiroshima. That bridge crosses over the confluence of two of the city’s rivers and is therefore distinctively T-shaped. When I was in Hiroshima in 2000, I stood a while on the bridge, watching the busy traffic crossing over it, and listening to the trundling sound made by trams as they lumbered across some of its joints.
In August 1945, since the shape of the bridge was so distinctive, it was used as ‘Ground Zero’ for the American pilot whose job it was to drop the world’s first operational A-bomb in exactly the right place.
Prior to dropping that one, other planes had come in over various parts of Hiroshima to drop sensors. The U.S. military wanted to make sure they knew everything about the effects of the bomb. Detonation was calculated to occur at around 600 metres into the air, for maximum dispersal of the radiation…
The upcoming/threatened attack against Iraq is, like the Hiroshima bombing, designed to have a big “demonstrative” effect, as well as to provide operational testing for some of the military’s latest gee-whiz gadgets. Indeed, as I wrote in a couple of posts last week (Feb. 19 and 21), it is designed according to a concept that is designed to replcate in a non-nuclear way the effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings on the Japanese…
200,000 people died in those two cities.
Today, online, I found a book called On a Small Bridge in Iraq, written by a Japanese writer called Natsuki Ikezawa. Ikezawa, who won the Mainichi Prize in 2000, visited Iraq in fall last year because, as he writes, if the country is going to be dstroyed by war and many of its people killed, he wanted to meet some of them and get to tknow them a little bit before it happens.
(At that link I gave, you can download his book for free. It’s only 39 pages, and has some really beautiful photos in, too.)
In it, he writes about having left one Iraq’s many ancient sites, that at Hatra in the north… “On the motorway leaving the ruins, we crossed a small bridge. Hatra was a trading city whose Arab inhabitants were strongly influenced by Hellenism. Situated in the desert, the city flourished thanks to the presence of several small sources of water, one of them a small stream. Although in this season, it was a bone dry river bed spanned by the bridge.
“As we crossed the small bridge, a graphic image of war suddenly came at me. At that very moment in the afternoon of 4 November 2002, in the hangars of an American base in a nearby country or on an aircraft carrier on the sea, a cruise missile was standing by, readied with these coordinates. In the not-too-distant future, it would come flying out of the clear blue sky, straight down toward this bridge, explode and destroy it. I could see it all too vividly. The bridge before my eyes was in flames, reduced to sand and ash.
“Countless other missiles inscribed with the coordinates for the bridges and municipal offices, petroleum refineries and electrical power stations in every city throughout Iraq are all awaiting their turn…
“Moreover, people will die. Some will be killed instantly by bombs and missilies, others will die slowly from lack of food or water or medicine. War makes no exceptions for children or women or the elderly. If war comes, they’ll all get the worst of it.
“Those firing the missiles definitely do not consider the after-effects. They’re soldiers, trained not to picture the horror in their mind’s eye… No longer does anyone actually have to see the enemy; the new technologies make it possible to kill without any feelings of guilt… ”
Read the rest in the book itself.
* * *
IRONIC TIMING? I’ve been doing a lot of intensive work researching the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg recently. I have also been thinking a lot about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But it took my recent reading of a book called Civilians at War, edited by Simon Chesterman, for me to put two and two together on these issues.
In his own contribution to the volume, Chesterman writes, “In one of history’s more brutal ironies, the treaty that established the Nuremberg trials–power’s celebrated tribute to reason*– was signed by the Allies on the same day that the United States dropped its second atomic bomb on Japan.”
(*The reference there was to Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson’s famous bon mot that the establishment of the Nuremberg Court was, “one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.”)
I think Chesterman may be off by a day. The Nagasaki bomb was dropped, I believe, on Aug. 9, 1945. The Charter for the N’berg Court was signed Aug. 8. The Hiroshima bomb was dropped Aug. 6. So I think the main gist of Chesterman’s observation still stands true…
* * *
THE DRAMA OF POTSDAM: Actually, one of the most illuminating things I’ve ever read about those tumultuous days was Charles L. Mee, Jr.’s Meeting at Potsdam. And it’s really well written, too.
So basically, at that summit meeting, which ran from July 17 through August 1, 1945 in a suburb east of Berlin, you had Truman– who knew that his people were making their last preparations to detonate the world’s first A-bomb within the coming days, and could thereby transform not just the strategic balance in Asia but also the shape of world politics. You had Stalin, who knew much more about the Manhattan Project and the imminence and powers of the planned bomb(s) than Truman knew that he knew. And you had Churchill who was sitting there pretending to represent a big power though the other two kept talking over the top of his head– and anyway, Churchill’s Conservative Party was facing a tough race in Britain’s elections, July 25, and indeed, they ended up losing…
Whooo! What a moment in history that was.
Okay, here’s a question. Is this the same Charles Mee who’s a playwright still writing great plays these days? If so, did he ever write a play about the Meeting at Potsdam? If not, why not?

NEW IMPROVED DOMAIN NAMES: Check ’em out: www.justworldnews.org and www.justworldnews.org will get you here any time.
They are easier to remember than all that “blogspot” business, plus less embarrassing to tell your friends about.
So tell your friends, okay? Thanks!

LESSONS FROM JOHN WOOLMAN: Yesterday I was writing about people, including yes, our Prez, being able to make a choice between acting out of a sense of fear, or acting from a sense of optimism, possibility, and yes even grace. Today, for completely another reason, I re-read a little portion from the Journal of John Woolman which describes a nice instance of such a choice.
John Woolman was an American Quaker in the days before there was a United States. (He died in 1772.) He is one of my heroes as a social activist and an acute analyst of the evils of the social system of his day– engagement in slaveholding and slavetrading by many whitefolks, including Quakers; encroachments by whitefolks on the lands and resources of the Indians; perpetuation of a war-based system which allowed those other ills to continue; etc etc.
So in June 1763, most of Philadelphia was ablaze with war fever, as the Anglo colonists became increasingly “outraged” at news of atrocities committed by those heinous Indians and the French (who else?) Even some Quakers on the city council were starting to swing behind the raising of war taxes…
John Woolman had a different idea. He decided to set out and actually meet some Indians in the west of Pennsylvania, face-to-face.
Journal entry for June 12th: “It being a rainy day we continued in our tent, and here I was led to think on the nature of the exercise which hath attended me. Love was the first motion, and then a concern arose to spend some time with the Indians, that I might feel and understand their life and the spirit they live in, if haply I might receive some instruction from them, or they be in any degree helped forward by my following the leadings of Truth amongst them… “
This is such a powerful passage! “Love was the first motion” is a phrase much loved by Quakers, including myself. Simple, direct, and powerful. No complicated theology needed.
Then, “that I might feel and understand their life and the spirit they live in”– just the desire for a simple human encounter, to feel with the Indians, that is, to share their life and burdens a little and strive for empathy with them.
“… if haply I might receive some instruction from them… ” This is truly mindblowing. Here’s JW, the product of centuries of European culture– and he is hoping that he may learn something from the brownfolks?!? What a guy! Are there many people in the U.S. or other rich cultures today who truly think they could learn anything much of value from poor people in the “Third World”?
And finally, very simply, “… or they be in any degree helped forward by my following the leadings of Truth amongst them.” I love that. Note that he writes “my following the leadings of Truth”, not “my preaching the leadings of Truth”. In other words, he is not going there explicitly to preach any Gospel, but rather, quietly to live its teachings…
But the whole venture of his trip was also, above and beyond all that, predicated on a deep and serious belief in the power of optimism and possibility. JW sincerely believed that just going to meet the Indians, to reach out to them and talk to them, and to find out what was up with them and in their lives, what their concerns were– that that was a better way to respond to the general climate of insecurity than succumbing to the climate of whipped-up fear and hatred, and joining in the preparations for war.
And I think he was right about that– just as he was right about the evils of slavery.
He was a simple Quaker fruit farmer. But he could see all around him, in his daily life and dealings, that most of the whitefolks in and around his community near Philadelphia had enough material goods to give them the basis for a decent respectable life. They didn’t need more “stuff”. (Indeed, he was one of the first to point out that material “stuff” creates its forms of bondage.) And meanwhile, he saw that the same system that gave the white colonists such material assurance was based on taking lands, resources, social integrity, and personal dignity away from the “Indians”, as well as on taking all the essential attributes of personhood away from the enslaved Africans.
So he worked to understand all the different kinds of people caught up in this system as well as he could. But more than that: he sought through persistent efforts at persuasion to persuade the power-holders in the system– that was, the whitefolks themselves– to see the error of their ways, and to behave differently.
With respect to the Quakers and slavery, he and a small group of fellow-activists succeeded in making a serious difference through persuasion alone. He, Antony Benezet, and other Quaker abolitionists successfully persuaded most American Quakers to dissociate themselves from the institutions of slavery; and it was that development, that happened at around the same time as American Independence, that laid the basis for the Quakers’ heroic involvement in the broader anti-slavery campaigns of the 19th century.
But JW’s work with respect to the American “Indians” is less well remembered. With the U.S. now all set to enter a new phase of trying to impose its will on broad swathes of the “Third World”, it might be good for would-be Americans reformers to remember some of the essentials of Woolman’s approach to the “Indians”. Above all, his simplicity, his humility, his respectfulness, and his rough-hewn sense of grace.

ACTING FROM FEAR– OR FROM A SENSE OF OPTIMISM AND POSSIBILITY? A couple of readers have asked why I keep scolding the administration hawks like a nanny and urging them to “take a deep breath”, “step back”, etc.
Mainly, the reason is that I see these guys just acting out of a very primitive, very counter-productive mindset dominated by fear.
They may seem to be acting like folks who are so purposeful, so dominating, so confident, so competent, so much in command of the world– But I’m afraid that what I mainly see when I see them strutting around is people who have no idea at all about the real possibilities that really are present in the world. Possibilities to build good productive relationships with nearly all of the world’s people who definitely seek such relationships, rather than confrontation and war. Possibilities to hold productive discussion of differences that can enlarge everyone’s understanding of what the issues are. Possibilities of re-building a world based on reason and cooperation, in such a way that the tiny minority of people who can’t accept a world of tolerance and sharing themselves become totally marginalized.
The U.S. is such a rich country, so overflowingly full of resrouces and possibilities in itself! Why can’t our leaders, okay, take that deep breath, thank the Creator for all their blessings, and then set about marginalizing the men of violence using reason, cooperation, a willingness to share responsibilities and blessings, and a calm, respectful approach to expanding the international rule of law?
That route just seems to me so much more doable, so much more productive, so much better for all of us than this shrill revving up of the machinery of war.
I guess I’m surprised, sometimes, that Bombs-away Don and the rest of them just can’t seem to see it my way.
But then I take my deep breath, and remember that nearly everyone who lives in Washington DC is acting right now out of a place of fairly serious trauma. They had the 9/11 crash into their very own Pentagon, losing friends and colleagues there. They had the anthrax scare, which I guess really was pretty scary for many residents of the national capital. Then, they had Greater DC’s long-drawn-out sniper scare, which would have been bad enough anywhere, but probably had an even more traumatic effect for the already doubly-traumatized Washingtonians.
And now, they have Tom Ridge with his constant stream of color-coded disaster warnings…
So yes, I can understand a little, perhaps, of where many Washingtonians coming from. (Though I note that many, many folks from the city have done a grand job of rising above feelings of traumatization and victimhood.)
But to understand where people like Rumsfeld and Co. are coming from doesn’t mean we should just roll over and let them proceed with their fantasies of a violence-based revenge. Oh no! But it does mean, though, that we probably need to spare a thought and a prayer for their mental/spiritual wellbeing, along with that of everyone else we’re concerned about these days.
For their own good, yes. And I really mean that. But also because those guys’ continued suspension in their present web of trauma and fear is extremely dangerous for the rest of us.