‘Journey to Jerusalem, 1995’, Part 1

I’m happy to make available to JWN readers Part 1 of a seven-part series I wrote about Jerusalem for Al-Hayat, back in July 1995. It’s here.
Getting this series into uploadable– and also, potentially editable– form is part of an ongoing project to data-mine some of my own past writings (especially those that are not readily available, even to me.) This Jerusalem series from 1995, for example: I think I have it on a floppy disk, someplace. But I don’t have a floppy disk reader any more, and anyway I’ve shifted from a PC to a Mac… What I do have are two yellowing paper copies of the whole series, a scanner, and some new OCR software that I’m still assessing. (ReadIris… not too bad, but not great either. On the other hand, a lot more affordable that Adobe Acrobat.)
Actually, I got the series commercially scanned since my scanner doesn’t have a sheet-feed, and then started doing the OCR.
Working with this material has been interesting: poignant and also extremely depressing. I spent about three weeks in Jerusalem in the summer of 1995, doing the research and interviews for it… Oh my goodness, how much worse the situation of the city’s Palestinians has gotten since then!
Poignant: There was the material from interviews I conducted Faisal Husseini, who passed away in 2001 (RIP). There was Faisal’s great but already heavily threatened institution, Orient House, which Ariel Sharon shut down a few months after Faisal’s passing.
That latter Wikipedia page notes,

    Items confiscated by the Israeli government included personal belongings, confidential information relating to the Jerusalem issue, documents referring to the 1991 Madrid conference and the Arab Studies Society photography collection. Also the personal books and documents of the late Faisal al-Husseini were summarily impounded.

What hooligans the Israeli authories sometimes are…
One of my main aims in republishing the 1995 series on Jerusalem now is to underline a couple of things:

    1. The fact that the kinds of challenges the Jerusalem Palestinians face today are by no means new. They’ve been living in this situation of extreme threat for a long time already.
    2. The fact that the policies pursued by the Israeli authorities toward the Jerusalem Palestinians started to become significantly harsher right after the conclusion of the Oslo Accord in 1993. From the point of view of Faisal Husseini or other Palestinian Jerusalemites, Oslo was a crock of nonsense that radically undermined rather than increasing their security.

One last note. The OCR really isn’t that great. (Or maybe I need to use it more smartly.) So I’ll put up the pieces in this series one at a time, as I can.

Iraq returning to post-election tensions?

Iraq’s Independent Higher Election Commission (IHEC) has taken much longer than expected to publish the results of the general election conducted five days ago, on Sunday. Their English-language website is here. I leave it to my esteemed friend Reidar Visser to interpret the details of what the IHEC has been releasing– e.g. here, yesterday evening. I will note only that the “latest news” posted here on the IHEC website tells us that they have (very) preliminary results only from five of Iraq’s 18 provinces– and of those, in the province in which the vote-counting was most complete, Najaf, the proportion of votes counted was still only 34.11%!
So it is still far too early to “call” the election even there. It looks as though the process of counting all the votes throughout the country will be a long one indeed.
Which need not be a problem in itself. There are plenty of countries in which vote-counting takes one or two weeks, due to to poor infrastructure of various kinds. And in this election, it’s true that the ballot sheets are enormous and complex, thus very difficult to handle in bulk and to tally.
However, the slowness of the IHEC in completing its work is bound to raise fears and tensions throughout the country, especially fears and accusations of ballot-rigging– just as happened in Afghanistan after last August’s election.
In Afghanistan, the sharp inter-party tensions that arose after the election were only finally reduced, after a number of weeks, when the main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, withdrew his challenge to the announced results. To the huge relief of the U.S. authorities in the country, that meant they, NATO, and the U.N. would not have to go through the enormous bother of organizing a run-off election. And Hamid Karzai was rapidly reinaugurated as president.
I’ve seen no reports on what inducements Abdullah was offered to withdraw, but I’m assuming there must have been some big ones, supplied by someone.
In Iraq, the post-election controversies could, but may not, become equally polarizing. There, it looks so far (but still with only very preliminary numbers) as if PM Maliki’s State of Law will emerge as the bloc with the largest number of seats, but well short of a simple majority, and even further short of the two-thirds majority required for many significant steps in governing the country. Therefore– as in Israel!– even if there is no controversy over the counting of the votes, there may still be a lengthy period of post-results coalition-forming haggling.
That was kind of what happened in Iraq in 2006. And then, of course, those post-election tensions immediately became tied up with the eruption of brutally intense sectarianism that followed the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra.
This time around, I am fairly strongly convinced– unlike some others in the antiwar movement here in the U.S.– that the U.S. authorities really do want to try to get the bulk of the military out of Iraq in accordance with the Withdrawal Agreement of November 2008. And to do this without the whole process being a debacle that would certainly destabilize the whole region, they need some form of “legitimate enough” government to emerge and start governing in Baghdad.
Just as, for slightly different reasons, they needed some form of “legitimate enough” government to emerge in Afghanistan last summer…
In the present global-political context, in which the U.S. has tied itself and much of the U.N. bureaucracy to the idea that western-style elections are an essential component (or source) of political legitimacy, having a “legitimate enough” government in a country under direct U.S. sway means that that government must emerge from elections that are also judged to be “legitimate enough”.
I earlier explored a few of the challenges involved in plucking “legitimacy” out of a severely challenged election with regard to the Afghan elections of 2004, here, and 2009, here.
It is not clear whether– or how– this may happen in Iraq. We need to stay attuned to the fall-out that can be expected throughout the whole region if the post-election political challenges there cannot be speedily and satisfactorily resolved.

So does Biden finally get it? Does Obama??

Shimon Shiffer, writing in Yediot Aharonot today (HT: Laura Rozen):

    While standing in front of the cameras, the U.S. vice president made an effort to smile at Binyamin Netanyahu even after having learned on Tuesday that the Interior Ministry had approved plans to build 1,600 housing units in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo. But in closed conversations, Joe Biden took an entirely different tone. …
    People who heard what Biden said were stunned. “This is starting to get dangerous for us,” Biden castigated his interlocutors. “What you’re doing here undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. That endangers us and it endangers regional peace.”
    The vice president told his Israeli hosts that since many people in the Muslim world perceived a connection between Israel’s actions and US policy, any decision about construction that undermines Palestinian rights in East Jerusalem could have an impact on the personal safety of American troops fighting against Islamic terrorism.

Helena Cobban, writing in The Christian Science Monitor November 24, 2009:

    President Obama urgently needs to distance Washington from the provocative – and illegal – actions the Israeli government has been undertaking in Jerusalem.
    He needs to do this to save the two-state solution that he supports between Israelis and Palestinians. He needs to do it, too, because it will help protect US troops around the world. Jerusalem is a core concern for many of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims, and with US forces now facing tense situations in several majority-Muslim countries, Washington has a stronger need than ever to keep the goodwill of the peoples of those lands…

I also wrote there that Pres. Obama should take concrete action,

    by linking US aid to Israel to its compliance with international law in the city, by supporting action by the UN Security Council to uphold international standards there, and in other ways.

It is that concrete action that we have not yet seen. If we fail to see it, then sadly we’ll have to conclude that it is not just the government of Israel that is putting the lives of U.S. service-members at risk, but also Pres. Obama, through the extreme timidity he has shown in his dealings with the government of Israel.

Kramer at Harvard: Student coalition pushing back

Kudos to the 16 student organizations at Harvard who co-sponsored an op-ed in the Harvard Crimson highly critical of the call that Martin Kramer issued recently for the U.S. government to halt its support for the U.N.’s provision of food and other humanitarian aid to Palestinian refugees, based on the claimed “pro-natalist” effects of this aid upon the size of Palestinian refugee families.
The op-ed also criticized the leadership of Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, where Kramer is a Visiting Scholar, noting that WCFIA leaders described Kramer’s statements only as “controversial”. The op-ed writers described this as,

    an alarming position since less than a century ago similar remarks were made against African Americans and Jews. The characterization of his statements as merely “controversial” is offensive and dismisses their deeply racist nature.
    Since the Weatherhead Center provides Mr. Kramer with a legitimizing and prominent public platform, we wonder whether it views any policy call as ethically disgraceful. We are troubled that the center has presented little to no diversity of viewpoints on the Israel-Palestine conflict. The only notable statements on the conflict emerging from the center are Mr. Kramer’s.

They made the following requests of the WCFIA:

    First, we ask that the Weatherhead Center not renew Mr. Kramer’s fellowship or affiliation… Second, we call on the center to establish a committee of faculty and students to recommend the adoption of a set of vetting practices for incoming fellows that uphold a set of principles unified on non-racism, in concert with Harvard University’s own commitment to non-discriminatory practices and diversity of viewpoints.

Personally, I think the second request could have been better framed. I’m not sure about “vetting practices” in this context, and the proposal to “establish a committee… to recommend the adoption” of a set of such practices seems clunky and cumbersome. How about asking WCFIA to establish a committee of faculty and students to explore ways it can more effectively push forward the principles of non-racism, inclusivity, and wide-ranging intellectual exploration to which the university is committed? … Something like that.
Well, that’s my quibble. But the main point is that this is a magnificent coalition of student groups that has signed onto the op-ed. May their strength increase and their labors become ever more fruitful!

U.S.’s extra-judicial killings in Pakistan

Joshua Foust had a really thoughtful post at Registan today, in which he started to assess the “effectiveness” of the drone-implemented, extra-judicial killings that the U.S. military has undertaken against hundreds of claimed “militant leaders” in northwest Pakistan over the past six years.
His conclusion:

    The end result of this incessant drone war against militant leadership is that the leadership itself is far more radical and far less willing to negotiate an end to their insurgency than they were in 2004. While the drones could be called a stunning success in going after al Qaeda, they’ve also been used for years to go after the Pakistani Taliban—and in both cases the men who replaced the dead commanders were more vicious and less amenable to overtures from governments to discuss an end to the violence.
    While a (very) brief look at the leadership of these organizations cannot really say much about their success or failure in aggregate, it can highlight some of the second order consequences of a somewhat overly narrow focus on degrading leadership. Successful though it may be—and if [the figures presented here by researchers at the New America Foundation are] to be believed, then a large majority of drone targets are actual bad guys—the drone war still carries with it serious consequences. Even within the insurgency in Northwest Pakistan, we cannot conclusively say that drones have had a major effect on operations, considering how much worse the area has gotten as strike frequency increased (we cannot draw anything more than a correlation on this front). Al Qaeda’s expeditionary reach may have been curtailed, but it seems to have been at the cost of vast swaths of Pakistan… and even Afghanistan. Have we been shooting ourselves in the foot?

So Foust is identifying two significant negatives that, he says, either did follow, or may have followed, from the U.S. military’s launching of the “drone war” in Pakistan:

    1. “The leadership itself is far more radical and far less willing to negotiate an end to their insurgency than they were in 2004.” Foust describes this as unequivocally an “end result” of the drone war.
    2. The situation in Northwest Pakistan– I’m assuming he’s referring to the political situation, the socioeconomic situation and the general conditions in which the area’s people live– have gotten worse. Foust describes this only as an observable “correlation”, without claiming to establish any actual responsibility of the drone war for having caused it.

But still. Given how much respect I have for Foust’s grasp of the dynamics in Afghanistan and Pakistan, I think we have to take seriously his argument that the net geostrategic effect of the drone war has probably been that it has been counter-productive.
To understand the scale of this “extra-judicial killing” phenomenon, go look at the NAF tables, which tell us that from 2004 until now, the U.S. military has launched 117 killer-drone strikes in Pakistan, killing somewhere between 846 and 1,238 people in Northwest Pakistan, of whom between 561 and 866 were described as “militants”.
Of the 117 killer-drone attacks, 21 have been launched in just the nine weeks of this year to date; and reportedly, a total of 55 since Pres. Obama’s inauguration.
I am very glad Foust has brought his thoughtful, public-policy form of cost-benefit analysis to the question of drone-based killings. But there is another form of analysis that should be applied, too, that I think is even more important: that is, an analysis of the validity/justifiability of these kinds of operations under international law.
I shall leave aside for the moment the issue of Pakistan’s national sovereignty. Not because I think it’s unimportant, but because I believe, as Foust does, that the strikes are carried out with the Pakistani government’s full knowledge and therefore, at some level with its acquiescence, or possibly cooperation.
Rather, I want to look at the whole ethics and legal situation of a policy whereby a network of U.S. military officers that spans several continents undertakes a process whereby a person is determined to be a “valid target for killing”; he is then located; and then, a series of steps are undertaken that send that inanimate killing machine, the drone, somewhere into his vicinity, and it targets and kills him.
Okay, first of all, this is not a precision, “one-bullet” type of killing. You can see from the NAF figures that if 117 strikes were reported, resulting in a minimum of 846 deaths, then each strike killed, on average, around seven people. Or perhaps, more than ten people.
Second, scroll down the NAF report through the incident-by-incident reporting for 2010. In 21 drone-killing strikes so far this year, between 112 and 186 people were reported killed. But the same local and global media reporting that arrived at those death tolls were able to name only ten actual identified “Al Qaeda/Taliban leaders” who were killed! Four of those named leaders were killed in one strike. In the majority of strikes, no named “leaders” were identified, at all. Thus, the drone killings seem not to be used only for killing known individuals identified (through some very opaque process) to be “leaders”, but also, very frequently, for killing anyone participating in what may look from a distance like a “gathering” of “Al Qaeda/Taliban militants”.
At the time of their being killed, are these alleged “militants” engaged in combat against the U.S. military? It would be hard to make such a claim, since the U.S. military has no publicly identified military units engaged in combat on Pakistani soil.
Therefore, it would seem to me that for the U.S. military to be going out at proactively hunting down and killing people, even allegedly “militant” people, who are located outside any zone of combat, is extra-judicial killing, not lawful combat.
The fact that the members of the U.S. military who “pull the trigger” on the drone are sitting in secure circumstances many hundreds or even thousands of miles away from the battlefield makes these killings feel even more dishonorable.
And then, let us look at the whole, presumed “information stream” on which the relevant commanders make their decisions to kill or not to kill. In a judicial killing (an execution), such as we have far too many of here in the U.S., the person to be killed is at least clearly identified by name, and the accusations against him or her have been extensively presented and tested in a court of law.
In the case of these killings carried out by our government in distant Pakistan, we have in most cases absolutely no idea what the “evidence” against any of the targets might be– or even, in most cases, who they are. They are simply individuals judged by some body or grouping inside the U.S. military to be “suspicious”, a “a threat”, or “possible militant leaders”, or whatever.
Where are the criteria? Where is the process that tests these accusations– that makes certain that a gathering, say, of men with guns in some corner of Waziristan is not simply a group going to accompany a groom to his wedding?
Nobody knows.
That is what makes this whole process of distance-killing so eery, so unaccountable and Star Chamber-like.
And it comes as no surprise that it really upsets the people on the ground, in Northwest Pakistan, a lot.
The U.S. military clearly seemed to “learn” a lot in this realm from the Israelis, who have used extra-judicial killings against distant enemies a lot, over the course of many decades, but most especially since the 1990s, in Gaza. It was the Israelis, too, who pioneered the use of airborne drones to execute those killings.
The Israelis’ use of extra-judicial killings (= assassinations) was never judged legal under international law, by anyone else. And nor should the U.S. military’s increasingly frequent use of this tactic– in both Pakistan and Afghanistan.
In addition, in Gaza, over the many years the Israelis used drone-based assassinations, they were never “effective” in terms of decapitating the leaderships of Hamas and its allied groups and leaving them in operational disarray. Instead, Israel’s repeated use of the tactic led Hamas to adapt in numerous ways, including by placing heavy stress on constantly raising up and testing new generations of successor leaders, by dispersing its assets, and so on.
In Pakistan, guess what, the militants have been doing the same thing. Indeed, it’s quite possible that the popular resentment aroused by the Americans’ use of the drone-based killings may result in the building of a well-entrenched popular movement where none was before.
Tragic. It’s like humankind has learned nothing over the last 200 years. Except now it is grown-up American boys in military uniforms, with video-games, who are sowing havoc many thousands of miles away from our shores.

The Biden factor: Iraq, Palestine– and Israel

Breaking news: late Wednesday evening in Cairo, Abu Mazen and his buddies at the Arab League decided there will be no ‘proximity talks’ between the PLO and Israel.
I’m kind of interested in the way Abu Mazen is getting Amr Moussa to front for him these days. It does indicate a serious lack of his own confidence in the depth of his support among Palestinians… But that matter is tangential to the main story here, which is–
The Amazingly Unsuccessful ‘Diplomatist’ Joe Biden!
Biden, lest we forget, is the man who in an interview with George Stephanopoulos last July, publicly gave Israel carte blanche to attack Iran whenever it wanted.
Biden was also, back in the pre-2003 day, one of Ahmed Chalabi’s main supporters in the U.S., and an enthusiastic backer of the idea of partitioning Iraq.
Since he became Vice-President, Biden has had a role “orchestrating” Washington’s Iraq policy on behalf of the president… Well, we’ve seen how that’s been going… To be fair, that is not as horrendously badly as it might have been going… But it hasn’t been going brilliantly, either– certainly not as brilliantly as most of the US MSM have been saying.
Biden has not done a particularly good job there, I think.
But he has really been bombing in Palestine.
Yes, of course we can and should lay the primary blame for what’s been happening in Jerusalem this past couple of days squarely on the Israeli government, the body that greeted Biden, on his first visit to Israel as vice-president, with not one but two announcements about the construction of new settler housing.
Notable that Yossi Sarid writes in Thursday’s Haaretz that,

    Don’t believe Benjamin Netanyahu for one moment when he says he “never knew” [about the 1,600 new settler housing units announced Tuesday.] The Jerusalem planning committee is only too aware of what the bosses want, and the government has decided to step up construction in greater Jerusalem. Dispossession and taking possession, kicking out and moving in – that’s what it’s all about.

Sarid also gave us these additional details about Biden’s time in Israel:

    This is one visit Joe Biden will not quickly forget. First he was compelled to sit through 25 minutes of an annoying speech in his honor by our president. Shimon Peres really believes that he is the destination for pilgrims from all over the world who drink in his musings and are intoxicated by his vision.
    Later, Biden was given a certificate memorializing his mother, but the glass broke. Once again, Bibi didn’t pay attention, leaned on it and shattered it. No fear, his speeches have always diverted attention from such mishaps. And finally, to add a finishing touch of infuriating disgrace, the Haredi neighborhood Ramat Shlomo was dumped on the vice-presidential head.
    Truth be told, the Obama administration just about asked for this slap. In Jerusalem, the lesson has been learned that the White House doesn’t fulfill its obligations – it just goes through the motions by issuing insincere rebukes.

Insincere rebukes, indeed.
Juan Cole and Pat Lang, two very seasoned analysts of Middle eastern dynamics, are just two of the people who say that, on hearing of the new settlement construction, Biden should simply have ordered up his plane and left Israel, rather than sitting there, going through the rest of the charade of the visit, while saying something on the record about how the Obama administration “condemns” the new construction.
I’m assuming Biden decided on this course of action after consultation with Washington. (He took 90 minutes to decide what to do.) Do he and his boss the Prez have no idea how disgusted most of the people in the world are with the fact that, though from time to time Washington might say something critical of Israel– meantime Washington never holds Israel to serious account, for anything, including “grave breaches of international humanitarian law” like implanting its settlers into occupied territories?
And the U.S. Congress continues to shovel money to Israel. U.S. diplomacy continues to get completely bent out of shape by defending Israel’s actions in every international forum, at every turn, and by zealously pursuing Israel-driven agendas throughout the entire Middle East, including with regard to Iraq and Iran.
And these actions by the administration and Congress put the lives of U.S. service-members deployed around the world, often in pursuit of Israel-driven agendas, in significant additional risk.
Regarding Biden, Pat Lang has this intriguing little vignette in his latest post:

    I was in Biden’s senate office on one occasion when Biden’s Zionism boiled over in a truly repulsive display of temper. I was there with my Arab employer to visit the senator… The Arab made some pro forma positive reference to the “peace process.” Biden flew into a rage, grew red in the face and shouted that this was an insincere lie and that his guest knew that it was only Arab stubbornness that prevented “little Israel’ from living in peace. His “guest” sat through this with what dignity he could manage. I would have walked out on him if I had been alone.

Assuming that the vignette’s true– and I tend to trust Lang on that– it reveals quite a few disturbing things about Biden. Not just the guy’s knee-jerk pro-Israelism, which is endemic just about everywhere in Congress, with a few notable exceptions. But also his evident lack of any diplomatic skills. I mean, why fly into a pro-Israeli rage like that if an Arab guest should happen to mention the “peace process”? What on earth good was he hoping to achieve by doing that? Nothing that I can think of– except to vent his own feelings.
… And meanwhile, George Mitchell, Mr. “Senior Peace Envoy”, has completely dropped off the map.
It is honestly not clear to me at all, right now, what it is that Obama and his people are hoping to achieve in the Arab-Israeli arena. Their entire “peace diplomacy” is in shambles. It’s as if Obama really doesn’t care any more about any of the lofty– but oh-so-important– goals he articulated back in the first days and weeks of his presidency. But he should realize that letting his “peace diplomacy” fall into disarray, as he has now done, is something that will have consequences far, far beyond Israel and Palestine. And quite possibly, more rapidly than anyone in Washington realizes.

That ‘democratic justification’ for invading Iraq, Part LXIII

It’s Tom Friedman, at it once again in today’s NYT!
Here we are now, almost exactly fourteen Friedman Units (F.U.’s) after George W. Bush’s (heavily Friedman-supported) invasion of Iraq, and the arrogant and over-rated “Sage of Bethesda” is now telling us that the decidedly mixed, and violence-plagued picture of what happened on Sunday’s election day in Iraq was unequivocally “a very good day for Iraq.”
Friedman completely omits to mention the big role that his own writings (and those of many NYT colleagues) played in 2002, in building up the nationwide constituency for the war. Instead, he just notes archly that,

    Some argue that nothing that happens in Iraq will ever justify the costs. Historians will sort that out.

That is, of course, also GWB’s own, famously self-exculpating line about the war.
And the Sage of Bethesda (SOB) doesn’t fail to give us one of his frequent little, faux-intimate verbal sparring matches with a world leader… In this case, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, to whom Tom addresses the following:

    How are you feeling today? Yes, I am sure you have your proxies in Iraq. But I am also sure you know what some of your people are quietly saying: “How come we Iranian-Persian-Shiites — who always viewed ourselves as superior to Iraqi-Arab-Shiites — can only vote for a handful of pre-chewed, pre-digested, ‘approved’ candidates from the supreme leader, while those lowly Iraqi Shiites, who have been hanging around with America for seven years, get to vote for whomever they want?” Unlike in Tehran, Iraqis actually count the votes. This will subtly fuel the discontent in Iran…

Oh my goodness. Do you think the SOB ever actually reads the news from Iraq where, as we know, Ahmed Chalabi’s extremely anti-democratic “Justice and Accountability Commission” intervened on Saturday to suddenly, on the eve of the election, disqualify 55 candidates– additional to the hundreds it had already disqualified, earlier on during the election campaign?
Chalabi is far from being a neutral figure in the election, since he’s running as a member of the Iraqi National Alliance, the Iran-backed list of mainly Shiite politicians.
So those 55 suddenly banned candidates– all of whom were affiliated with other blocs, mainly the Iraqiyya bloc headed by Ayad Allawi– still had their names on the ballots on Sunday; and thus not only were they subjected to last-minute banning, but in addition everyone who voted for them suddenly had their votes rendered essentially meaningless.
As the WaPo’s Ernesto London and Leila Fadel report from Baghdad today,

    If the votes for the newly barred candidates are annulled, it could give the Iraqiya coalition powerful ammunition to allege vote-rigging by rival politicians, including some in the Shiite-led camp of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
    “It will be a very violent reaction,” Allawi said in an interview Tuesday. “A lot of violence will take place, and God knows how this will end. I will tell you there is already an existing feeling that there was widespread rigging and widespread intimidation.”

And it’s not just those 55 suddenly-banned candidates and those who voted for them who’re at risk of having their political rights suddenly stripped from them. Londono and Fadel report that,

    Faraj al-Haidary, chairman of Iraq’s Independent High Electoral Commission, said Tuesday night that … under Iraqi law, the Justice and Accountability Commission could theoretically bar more candidates in the days ahead if it submits paperwork before the electoral board certifies them as lawmakers.

Ah, but my friend Tom, sitting in Bethesda, can assure us that Iraqis “get to vote for whomever they want”?
The WaPo journos also write about our friend the Iraq specialist Reidar Visser that he,

    said the last-minute disqualification of candidates poses significant challenges for the electoral commission. Because Iraqis were able to choose individual candidates in the elections — as opposed to voting for slates that distribute the seats — disqualifying elected candidates could enrage voters.
    “This could create a major problem for the whole process,” Visser said. “We have seen that there is no legal framework to deal with these eventualities, so they’re creating the framework as they proceed.”

So the post-election period in Iraq this time might well be– just as it was after the last national election, in December 2005– very messy, long-drawn-out and quite possibly even, as Allawi warned, violent.
So please let’s not sing any paens to the triumph of “democracy” in Iraq yet. (As Newsweek did last week, and as far too many other stalwarts of the US MSM seem to have been doing this week, too.)
George Bush’s hastily cobbled-together, back-up main “justification” for invading Iraq in 2003, remember, was– once he finally realized the “WMD justification” was a crock of nonsense– that the US occupation liberation of Iraq would usher in a new era of democratic, accountable, and successful government that would immediately become a model for the striving peoples of the whole of the rest of the region…
(Kind of like what the SOB was still arguing in his mendacious piece today.)
But in the aftermath of Iraq’s December 2005 election, the country was plunged into deeper sectarianism and social collapse than it had ever before experienced, and for roughly 18 months thereafter the violence and heartbreak continued unabated, sending streams of extremely distressed Iraqis fleeing for their lives.
Electoral “democracy”, it turned out, was not a “model” that anyone anywhere else in the region wanted to emulate, at all. (In the OPTs, interestingly, all the major political forces did continue with their plans to hold an OPTs-wide parliamentary election just six weeks after that Iraqi election, in January 2006. Washington’s ferocious response to the results of that election gave the lie to any lingering idea anyone might have had that George W. Bush really did have any gut sympathy for the norms and principles of democratic self-governance… )
And, contra to what the SOB is now telling us, I certainly don’t think anyone in the Middle East, whether Iranians, Arabs, Turks, Israelis, or anyone else, is sitting on the edge of their chairs thinking that the 2010 election in Iraq is going to usher in a fabulous period of successful, democratic self-governance in Iraq. The most that anyone is able to hope for, really, is that despite the machinations of Ahmed Chalabi and his gang– the ones who got us into the war and occupation in the first place, remember, along with Bush and Cheney– Iraq’s conflict-battered people may somehow find a governance system that works for them and allows them to rebuild a society that has been torn apart by two decades, now, of extremely vindictive, lethal, politicidal, and arrogant western policy toward their country.
How Iraq’s citizenry decide to govern themselves is completely up to them. For Tom Friedman or anyone else to claim they know what should happen is imperialist arrogance of the most outdated and destructive kind.

Nothing to add

… to the “news” from the State Department about the “media note from George Mitchell that we have begun indirect talks and that he will be returning to the region next week.”
Nothing to add, that is, to what I wrote here last week, that with all this business of “proximity talks” it looks as if we are rushing forward helter-skelter… to 1949.

Obama, Biden cave to Netanyahu

So Vice-President Biden arrives in Israel– and the very same day the Israeli government announces it will build 112 new apartments in the settlement of Beitar Illit.
This despite PM Netanyahu’s “pledge” to halt the building of settlements in the West Bank (outside of East Jerusalem) for ten months– and despite the Israeli government’s broader commitment to halt all settlement construction under the 2002 Road Map.
Does Biden get on the next plane out of the country the moment he heard of the Beitar illit plan?
No.
The Israeli defense ministry said building the 112 apartments was needed “to plug a potentially dangerous 40-yard gap between two existing buildings.”
But oh my gosh! I understand that there are still a few other places in the West Bank where there are gaps between one settlement building and another… Or– even more dangerous!– gaps between one settlement and another! Evidently all these “gaps” need to be built on immediately! How can the settlers possibly be secure at any point before the whole occupied West Bank is covered with their apartment blocks???
(Irony alert.)
Honestly, if the Obama administration accepted this form of argumentation, as apparently it did, then it is being run by people who are either extremely stupid or irresponsible to the point of criminality.
I’m trying to get my head around why they feel they need to cave so completely to the Netanyahu government. It cannot only be the prospect of the upcoming mid-term elections here in the U.S. Could it be that Netanyahu is threatening that, unless the US goes along with his plans in the West Bank, then he cannot be responsive to the requests they make of him for restraint regarding Iran?
If so, this is outrageous blackmail. Obama and Biden should call Netanyahu on it immediately.

Waskow’s sad arguments against BDS

I was just watching the discussion that Amy Goodman (video here) recently moderated between Omar Barghouti of the Global BDS Movement and Rabbi Arthur Waskow, over the utility and ethics of the BDS campaign.
Waskow criticized the BDS movement without reservation. I thought his arguments were kind of sad: often inaccurate, and off-the-mark, and extremely US-centric. A big part of his argument had to do with the ways in which the situations of White-dominated Apartheid South Africa and today’s Israel are similar, or different. Waskow tried to argue that whereas the Apartheid government got its foreign support mainly from corporations, Israel gets its support mainly from the US government… Ergo, while boycotting or taking other actions against Chase Manhattan Bank were appropriate and useful in the 1970s/80s, over South Africa, today what’s needed is to build a broad coalition of peace-loving Americans to change the policy of the US government.
He also argued that BDS “seeks to demonize an entire people, with a culture and life of their own, etc.” in Israel… (As if the Afrikaners who dominated Apartheid SA had no culture or life of their own?? I’m still not sure what the difference was there.)
I thought Barghouti made the counter-arguments excellently, and was particularly effective when, a number of times, he pointed out that Waskow’s way of arguing seemed to completely ignore the Palestinians’ own agency and the demand for BDS that is so widely supported among Palestinian civil society of all stripes. Waskow really did come across very isolated and arrogant. It was sad, really to see this person who historically did play a good role in U.S. social movements now engaging in special pleading on behalf of the Jewish state.
Dressing up like Tolstoy does not, it turns out, mean you end up acting with Tolstoyan detachment and universalist ethics.
Anyway, it’s great that Amy Goodman hosted this important discussion. It’s a topic we need to discuss a lot more in the US– and also, to put into action.