Daniel in the lions’ den

Charismatic British-Israeli peacenik Daniel Levy made a remarkable presentation this morning, at a big conference on US-Israeli relations organized by the extremely rightwing, pro-Israeli think-tank, the Hudson Institute.
Luckily Matt Duss of the Center for American Progress’s Wonk Room was there to video and verbally describe the highlights for the rest of us.
If you scroll down Matt’s blog post there to the 6-minute video you can enjoy not just Daniel’s great presentation but also the extreme discomfort of his fellow-panelists Doug Feith and the equally craven Bob Lieber. It is also kind of fun to see Daniel speaking his mind about the disaster of the current Israeli government’s policy while many iterations of the Hudson Institute’s logo are waving around behind his head.
Scroll down even further for the handily provided actual transcript of what he said.
Talk about Daniel in the den of lions, eh?
So okay, here is my big confession. I was actually at that same conference– until just before Daniel and Co. got to speak; but I had to duck out just before their panel started.
I was there, however, for the peroration made earlier by Israeli ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, who until recently worked under some degree of cover as a ‘neutral’ (nudge-nudge, wink-wink) US historian of the US’s Middle East policy.
The heart of what Oren had to say was a fuller, verbal elaboration of the theme he introduced in this recent article in The New Republic:

    Where Ahmadinejad leaves off, the Goldstone Report, or, as it is officially called, the “United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict,” persists…
    The Goldstone Report goes further than Ahmadinejad and the Holocaust deniers by stripping the Jews not only of the ability and the need but of the right to defend themselves. If a country can be pummeled by thousands of rockets and still not be justified in protecting its inhabitants, then at issue is not the methods by which that country survives but whether it can survive at all. But more insidiously, the report does not only hamstring Israel; it portrays the Jews as the deliberate murderers of innocents–as Nazis. And a Nazi state not only lacks the need and right to defend itself; it must rather be destroyed.

Oren is a sad, sad, and deeply wounded guy if he can even imagine such an accusation against Judge Goldstone.
That is why I am really glad that his sick ranting was followed, in short order, by the eminent good sense from Daniel Levy.
I wish Oren could have stuck around to hear Levy. But he, too, had to duck out. His driver nearly ran me down as I biked away from the Hudson Institute.

Gitmo, Kafka, and the abuse of ‘law’

Kudos to Christopher Flavelle of ProPublica for his article about the case of Kuwaiti citizen Fouad Mahmoud al-Rabiah. Rabiah’s been held at Gitmo since 2002– and finally, last month, received a judgment of ‘Habeas Corpus’ from US District Court for the District of Columbia Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.
‘Habeas Corpus’ is Latin for, “that you may have the body”. Basically it means the government now needs to give due cause to the judge as to why they want to continue to hold Rabiah– or else, to release him.
Let us only hope for the sake of this man and the others like him that this next step is speedily accomplished.
Kollar-Kotelly’s judgment is important because in it she disposes speedily and abruptly with many of the claims made by the US government defendants in the case. Also, because the transcript of her carefully reasoned judgment, which ProPublica makes available in the lightly redacted form in which the court gave it to them, makes clear that the only evidence the US government ever had against Rabiah was (a) evidence provided by fellow detainees after interrogations that were, presumably, extremely abusive, and (b) ‘confessions’ that he made after very abusive interrogations and after he’d been told that other people had ‘informed’ against him and that he needed to confess to something if he ever wanted to return to his home again.
It is so very, very complex and painful for the US justice system to unwind the many contortions and distortions into which the Bush-era policy of detentions and interrogations wound it.
I wish Obama and Attorney-General Eric Holder would work much faster on this. All this junk evidence that emanates only from abusive interrogations should be summarily thrown out and all the detainees freed against whom there is not good, untainted, independent evidence of wrongdoing.
The rest of the detainees should speedily be brought to trial– preferably within the US, or anyway with all the protections to which they would be due in a US courtroom– on the basis of that good, untainted evidence and only that evidence.
To do anything else only further degrades the bedrock of our country’s constitutional system.

US-UN power tussle over Afghanistan?

Eight years ago today, the US– with the help of non-trivial allies like Russia, Iran, and India– launched its invasion of Afghanistan. Shortly thereafter (though not before) the UN gave a sort of retroactive imprimatur of approval to the invasion. Then in March 2002, the Security Council created the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA). Its staff members, now numbering more than 1,000, have the mission of supporting the political and the socio-economic reconstruction of the country.
The US has, however, remained until now as the main external decision-making force inside Afghanistan. That may be about to change, due to the severe resource constraints the US is facing and the evident failure of the US-led occupation forces to resolve Afghanistan’s extremely deep political/security crisis.
Anyway, Pres. Obama is engaged right now in the wide-ranging deliberations that are needed as he addresses the incredibly complex conundrums that his administration faces in Afghanistan. (Another legacy of GWB, we can note.)
Meanwhile, a whole parallel crisis has started erupting in the relations between the US and the UN in Afghanistan. It has been precipitated mainly by the recent actions taken by cowboy US diplomatic “entrepreneur” Peter Galbraith
Until very recently Galbraith was working as deputy to UNAMA’s Norwegian head Kai Eide. But last week Eide abruptly fired fired Galbraith after he publicly accused Eide of suppressing information that UNAMA had gathered about numerous, allegedly serious irregularities in August’s Afghan elections.
Now, Galbraith or someone presumably close to him, has turned that raw data over to the Washington Post, which today published a digest of some of the most damaging parts of it.
The WaPo does not describe how it got hold of this (presumably illegally supplied?) data. But it also does not question its authenticity. Indeed, the reporters in question, Colum Lynch and Joshua Partlow, write,

    Dan McNorton, the U.N. spokesman in Kabul, did not challenge the authenticity of the spreadsheet, but he said it should be read with caution. “The information that you have is unsubstantiated raw data and should be treated as such,” he said.

Regarding Galbraith’s own personal history and credentials, we can note that he was an early and strong supporter of Croatia’s move to secede from the Yugoslav (“Southern Slav”) federation, and was subsequently Pres. Clinton’s first ambassador to Croatia. He was a strong cheerleader for the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Before and since 2003 he has been a very loud proponent of Kurdish independence and the partition of Iraq.
His actions have often had a gadfly, very destabilizing aspect to them, and though he has been described as a close ally of Obama’s AfPak representative, he was not working for Holbrooke or for the US government in the position he occupied in UNAMA.
The lead of today’s WaPo piece says this:

    Voter turnout data kept confidential by the United Nations’ chief envoy in Kabul after Afghanistan’s disputed August presidential election show that in some provinces the official vote count exceeded the estimated number of voters by 100,000 or more, providing further indication that the contest was marred by fraud.
    In southern Helmand province — where 134,804 votes were recorded, 112,873 of them for President Hamid Karzai — the United Nations estimated that just 38,000 people voted, and possibly as few as 5,000, according to a U.N. spreadsheet obtained by The Washington Post…

Disturbing allegations, indeed.
Lynch and Partlow write,

    Galbraith pressed Eide to turn over to international monitors the United Nations’ estimated turnout data, which indicated that many fewer voters cast ballots in certain provinces than the number of votes recorded by election officials. Galbraith said Eide refused to share this data with the internationally led Electoral Complaints Commission once it became clear that the information reflected poorly on Karzai.
    In an interview last week, Eide acknowledged withholding the data, saying that the information could not be verified and that he required a formal request in order to share it. He said he was confronted by a “confusing situation” in which “a lot of information was coming from sources that had their own agenda. We can’t just hand over a bunch of information if we haven’t made a solid assessment of it.”
    Eide added that he “really feels offended” by allegations that he favored Karzai, saying he had taken a balanced approach that enjoyed the “unanimous” support of the international community.

Well, Eide is evidently trying to make the best decisions he can, in the very difficult position he finds himself in, in Kabul, caught between the continuing indecision of Washington over Afghanistan and the slow shift in the global balance from “the west” to “the rest.”
The big decisions that will need to be made in Afghanistan will at some point be made, not by Kai Eide but by either Pres. Barack Obama or some “concert” of the world’s great powers, once the US makes the decision– that now seems almost inevitable to me– to ask the other members of the UN Security Council to help bail it out of the extremely difficult situation it finds itself in, in Afghanistan.
Eide, remember, works for the Security Council, acting through the agency of the cipher-like UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon and his UN Department of Peacekeeping Affairs.
Here at JWN, I have been one of very few voices inside the US who have argued for several years now that responsibility for supporting and enabling the reconstruction and political reconstitution of Afghanistan should rightfully and most effectively be undertaken by the UN, rather than under some form of US-led (including US-NATO) “leadership”.
Let’s never forget how geographically and culturally distant the US is from Afghanistan, or the fact that the Security Council’s two non-western permanent members have much greater propinquity to Afghanistan and much deeper direct interests in securing the country’s stabilization than does the US.
(I see that Robert Kaplan has just started discovering things about Beijing’s increasing involvement in Afghanistan that I’ve been writing about for more than a year now.)
Anyway, for those watching how the shift in the US-UN relationship (or “west-rest” relationship) are now playing out over Afghanistan, today’s WaPo piece provides some intriguing tidbits of evidence.
Lynch and Partlow write,

    U.N. officials have accused Galbraith of seeking to overturn the Afghan constitution in his zeal to thwart Karzai’s election victory, saying he sought to “disenfranchise” large numbers of potential Karzai voters by closing 1,500 of 6,900 polling stations in volatile regions in southern and southeastern Afghanistan that are populated by members of the president’s Pashtun ethnic group.
    Senior U.N. officials also asserted that Galbraith urged Eide in a meeting in early September to consider annulling the elections because of fraud, to convince Karzai and Abdullah to step aside, and to set up a transitional government headed by Ashraf Ghani, a former World Bank economist who finished in fourth place with 2.7 percent of the vote. Galbraith, according to these officials, offered to seek support for the plan from Vice President Biden.
    “Here’s a man, a U.N. representative, advocating an unconstitutional change of government,” Vijay Nambiar, Ban’s chief of staff, said of Galbraith. “Of course he was recalled. What would you have expected us to do?”
    Galbraith declined to discuss the details of the meeting but said there had been no formal proposal for a new government or a mission to Washington. “It’s a smoke screen to obscure the real issue, which was whether the U.N. should handle electoral fraud,” Galbraith said. “There was no mission to Biden or anybody else because there was no plan to do this.”

We can note that over past years Galbraith worked very closely with Biden over his plans for partitioning Iraq.
Close coordination between UNAMA and the US authorities in Kabul is very evidently something that’s not only desirable, but absolutely essential. But the idea that Galbraith might act as a kind of “back channel” to Obama through Biden seems destabilizing and confusing, though somewhat typical of his previous MO’s.
Lynch and Partlow noted that,

    On Saturday, Karl W. Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan… [told] a gathering of two dozen diplomats that the United States has full trust in Eide. “The U.S. Embassy has full confidence in UNAMA and its leadership,” said Caitlin Hayden, a U.S. Embassy spokeswoman.
    Edmond Mulet, the U.N. assistant secretary general for peacekeeping, also defended the envoy. “Kai has the full support of the secretary general and of the most important stakeholders, the member states, including the United States, and all the ambassadors and special envoys sitting in Kabul,” he said.

Meanwhile, Galbraith is kicking his heels here in Washington. Actually, having watched him from a distance, I feel pretty certain he’s not just kicking his heels, but must be up to something.
My sense of the current bottom line on this story is that the days when Americans– whether Presidents, presidential envoys, or cowboy diplomatic operators like Peter Galbraith– could just between them determine the entire fate of distant countries with little regard to the needs or preferences of non-Americans are now rapidly coming to an end.

Israelis reconsidering views of ‘the Other’

Haaretz has had two interesting stories in recent weeks detailing attempts by Jewish Israeli peace activists to stimulate discussion and reconsideration among their compatriots regarding their views of ‘the Other’.
One of these stories was about a project jointly undertaken by Israeli conceptual artist Mushon Zer-Aviv worked and the brilliant Gaza-Palestinian writer Laila El-Haddad: They created a walking tour of Tel Aviv in which, by overlaying a map of Gaza City onto the map of Tel Aviv, participants could understand the spatial relationships among various different spots in Gaza City by visiting geographically analogous spots in Tel Aviv.
If you’re in Israel, there’s a number you can call, and then punch in numbers to hear Laila’s audio homage to her chosen Gaza City locations. Now, the YANH team has put the audio clips onto their website, too. So even if you’re not in Israel you can download a copy of the project’s map and take an audio-enhanced virtual tour around such Gaza landmarks such as the Arts & Crafts Village, the Palestinian Parliament building, Kathem’s ice cream parlor, etc…
In the Haaretz description of the project linked to above, read Laila’s thoughtful expression of her feelings about working with Zer-Aviv on this project.
The second project described/reviewed by Haaretz is the book about Israeli perceptions of Golan that peace activist (and longtime Golan resident/settler) Yigal Kipnis published recently about Israeli perceptions of Golan.
Reviewer Yechiam Weitz writes,

    The main argument put forth by Kipnis, a geographer and historian, is that the image of the Golan built up over those years in the eyes of the Israeli public was that “the mountain has become a monster,” in the words of a song by Yoav Katz, entitled “The Little Girl from Gadot” (a kibbutz at the foot of the Heights). This perception reached its climax in 1967, “but continued to be shaped and preserved in the collective memory, where it remains fixed to this day.” Kipnis asks if this image is justified, and he proceeds to respond to his own question in a way both complex and riveting.
    From the narrow point of view of the residents of the border settlements, who “underwent the routine of life in a war zone at a topographical disadvantage, the answer is decidedly yes,” writes the author. But this subjective memory does not correspond with the historical facts. In actuality, there was no justification at all for the menacing image of a Syrian Golan Heights. The primary reason for this was Israel’s military superiority over Syria, which only increased as the years went by. In this context, Kipnis points out something that is to a large extent an absurdity: “The greater that Israel’s military superiority became, the more powerful was the image, and the more Israel made use of its superior force, the power of the image reached new levels.”

This latter point is one that has much broader applicability in terms of the self-image of Israelis in general, I think.
I am really looking forward to reading Kipnis’s book in English. I do hope it gets translated soon!
Weitz discloses in the review that he himself is the son of Raanan Weitz, who was head of the Settlement Department of the Jewish Agency. He notes that Israel’s M in 1967, Levi Eshkol, had succeeded Raanan Weitz as head of the settlement department and had pursued jewish settlement efforts for many years prior to 1967.
Nevertheless, according to the research revealed in Kipnis’s book,

    Very soon after the war’s end, on June 19, 1967, Eshkol’s cabinet made a dramatic and secret decision: It would sign peace agreements with Egypt and with Syria based on the international borders. All the ministers supported it, including Menachem Begin, who had joined the government on the eve of the war and was a full partner in formulating the decision. It proposed “offering Syria a peace agreement based on the international border, ensuring Israel’s water rights, and the demilitarization of the Golan Heights.”
    The decision was conveyed to the American administration, which was to transmit it to the rulers of Egypt and Syria. Kipnis suggests that, “Contrary to conventional wisdom, Egypt and Syria did not reject the peace offer … for the simple reason that it was never passed on to them by the U.S. government.” When no reply to his generous offer was received, Eshkol understood that “the vision of a peace agreement with Syria was not about to be realized in the near future,” and he laid down the policy that there would not be a withdrawal from the Golan without a peace agreement. “This policy was based on the deployment of an
    Israeli presence on the Golan and on plans for settlement there, as well as demonstrating determination to hold on to it for as long as was necessary,” Kipnis explains.
    Eshkol led the settlement enterprise on the Golan until his death in February 1969…

I am fascinated by this assertion that Eshkol had transmitted to the Americans his withdrawal offers to both Egypt and Syria with, presumably, the clear expectation (or outright request?) that Washington pass them on to those two other governments– but that Washington never did send the message on to Cairo and Damascus.
If so, then the U.S. government bears a large degree of responsibility for all the human suffering that has been occasioned since 1967 by the long delay (in the case of Egypt) and the failure to date (for Syria) of the effort to secure a land-for-peace final peace between Israel and those two countries.
Most notably, given that today is October 7, we could say that the huge human suffering occasioned by the October War of 1973 could have been completely avoided. That war was launched by Egypt and Syria on October 6, 1973 with the express effort of restarting the long-stalled peace diplomacy (in the case of Sadat) and of both restarting the diplomacy and regaining the Syrian national land still held under Israeli occupation (in the case of Syria.)
We can also note that since 1967 some half million Syrian citizens– persons displaced into the Syrian interior by the 1967 war and the subsequent occupation, and their descendants– have been deprived of the right to reside or farm in their families’ rightful Golan homesteads; and the 17,000 or so Golani Syrians who have stayed in their homes since 1967 have been forced to live under a land-grabbing form of Israeli military occupation for 42 years now.
… Anyway, I am really delighted to see the attention being given to Kipnis’s book– as to the very innovative cultural intervention undertaken by Zer-Aviv and El-Haddad. The peace forces in Israel are so much better grounded in the history and realities of their community’s always tortured relations with its Arab neighbors than are most of the ardent “supporters of Israel” in the west! The ignorance many of these “supporters” display about Israel’s own past and present actions is often almost as great as their disregard for the rights and views of Israel’s Arab neighbors.

Khomeini guardian’s jarring question

Iran’s ongoing internal “chess match,” the intense controversy over Iran’s presidential elections and the aftermath, is not only “not over,” it’s getting profoundly interesting. The charges & counter-charges continue to fly, with both sides dredging up extraordinary heavyweights, figuratively and literally, to their cause. A few mind-boggling examples:
Those notables who boycotted President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-inauguration included no less than Hassan Khomeini, grandson of the very Ayatollah who led the 1979 revolution. Khomeini was otherwise occupied visiting one Alireza Beheshti, son of a famous clerical martyr from the early years of the revolution. Beheshti had just been released from imprisonment — for being a close aide to Mir Hossen Musavi, the still resisting leader of the green wave.
From another direction, Mohammad Javad Larijani is the newest prominent voice blasting Musavi and Khomeini for “treason,” for betraying the revolution (etc., etc.) Curious. I’ve long followed Javad Larijani’s work. When not being a genuine “theoretical physicist,” he’s been a noted “facilitator” behind various efforts to improve ties to the US. He’s also a member of the extraordinary brothers Larijani (e.g. Ali, current Parliamentary speaker and Sadegh, the new Judiciary Chief).
Topping that comes a pointed question for Larijani from Mohammad Ali Ansari, a keeper of the flame (if you will) for Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini as the director of Khomeini’s Publications. While defending the house of Khomeini, Ansari tosses his own rhetorical doozy:

“how can we criticize a ban on holocaust investigations calling it an undemocratic act, and then adamantly deny a simple demand for a probe into a recent election in Iran?”

What a question.

Continue reading “Khomeini guardian’s jarring question”

Goldstone’s careful documentation & argument

I’ve had the chance to be reading more of the report of the Goldstone Commission Report (PDF). It’s 425 pages long, so not an easy or light read!
But I’ve been very impressed with the thoroughness of both the documentation and the argumentation in the report. Goldstone and his team are very professional and careful investigators of atrocities. He, of course, got his first experience of doing such work when he was investigating allegations of serious wrongdoing by the security forces in his native South Africa in 1989-90. There, too, his investigation was hampered by serious non-cooperation from the state authorities and he was subjected to some fairly vile slurs mobilized by the state’s propaganda apparatus… But he persisted; and his report opened a chink of understanding among many White South Africans who until then had preferred to turn a blind eye, into the actions the Apartheid-era security forces took against their non-White compatriots, allegedly on their behalf…
His latest report shows the same thoroughness he brought to his work there, and later to the indictments he drew up against leading perpetrators of atrocities in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
For example, the Report has pulled together an excellent chronology of all the military incidents that occurred during the six-month ceasefire that started June 19, 2008. This account makes clear– as many official Israeli sources already have– how few in number were the incidents of firing any kind of ordnance from Gaza into Israel during the whole period until November 4– the day on which Israel itself undertook a major and deliberate violation of the ceasefire. But it goes beyond the official Israeli sources in noting that those rockets and missiles that were fired from Gaza prior to November 4 were not attributable to Hamas. many were attributed to– or even claimed by– the Fateh-affiliated Al-Aqsa Brigades. Others, to Islamic Jihad.
So this picture of an “unstoppably violent” Hamas that Israelis like to portray to the world is quite simply untrue. Yes, Hamas uses violence for political ends. (Like Israel.) But it does not do so irrationally or uncontrollably; and indeed, it turns out that Hamas– like Israel– is deterrable.
The report has a lengthy consideration of the Israeli forces’ firing, on January 6, of four mortars against Al-Fakhoura Street, near to an UNRWA school being used as a shelter for civilians who had fled other zones of fire. The mortars apparently killed more than 31 people. In the course of many, heavily-footnoted pages the report considers all the evidence available to it concerning what actually happened. It noted that the Israelis’ official version of what had happened changed over time.
It finds, para. 690, that:

    the attack may have been in response to a mortar attack from an armed Palestinian group but considers the credibility of Israel’s [argument to this effect] damaged by the series
    of inconsistencies and factual inaccuracies.

It then does some very thoughtful legal analysis of the Israelis’ decision to use mortars in this quite evidently heavily populated area, and concludes thus:

    696. [T]he Mission finds the following:

      (a) The military advantage to be gained was to stop the alleged firing of mortars that posed a risk to the lives of Israeli armed forces;
      (b) Even if there were people firing mortars near al-Fakhura Street, the calculation of the military advantage had to be assessed bearing in mind the chances of success in killing the targets as against the risk of firing into a street full of civilians and very near a shelter with 1,368 civilians and of which the Israeli authorities had been informed.

    697. The Mission recognizes that for all armies proportionality decisions will present very genuine dilemmas in certain cases. The Mission does not consider this to be such a case.

I note that one of the other three members of Goldstone’s fact-finding team was Colonel Desmond Travers, a former officer in the Irish Armed Forces and member of the Board of Directors of the Institute for International Criminal Investigations (IICI).
One of the real strengths of the report is that it provides, for the world public, real details about the terrible way in which named people were hurt during the fighting. It also provides a record of evident and systematic disinformation about the nature of the Israeli actions.
In discussions here and elsewhere in the week since the report came out, supporters of the government of Israel have ranted and raved against the report, against Judge Goldstone himself, and against the UN. They have not, however, presented any factual evidence that refutes any of the report’s findings.
And most of them have given no indication whatsoever that they have even read the report. They should. So should everyone concerned about the prospects for peace in the Middle East. And so should all US citizens who are concerned about how Israel uses all the financial and military aid our government gives to it.

Abu Mazen’s legitimacy plunging

Just two months ago, Abu Mazen’s western backers (and bank-rollers) were lauding the non-trivial achievement he racked up by being able to convene a selected list of invitees to the Fateh General Conference. In the weeks since then, his political standing in the Palestinian street has taken four nosedives:

    1. Two weeks ago he was forced by his US funders to go and make nice at the “three-way” with Obama and Netanyahu at the General Assembly– despite Netanyahu having blithely continued with his construction of Jews-only settlements on Palestinian land in East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank.
    2. Obama, on whom Abu Mazen had pinned so many hopes, has apparently caved on continuing to do anything serious to hold Israel to account for its settlement construction– and he has taken no concrete actions on the peace diplomacy, either.
    3. The concerted campaign by the Israeli government, the rightwing Jerusalem municipality, and quasi-non-governmental settler groups to Judaize Jerusalem while ruthlessly suppressing the rights of the city’s rightful Palestinian residents, has continued; and finally
    4. In “the war over the war over Gaza”, Abu Mazen made a massive concession to the Israelis by having his person at the UN Human Rights Council ask to “defer” any further action on the Goldstone Report until March. For many Palestinians around the world, Abu Mazen’s betrayal of the Goldstone/UN push to hold the Israeli government somewhat accountable for the death and destruction it inflicted on Gaza last winter has been a turning point.

In this post Sunday, Long knives in Ramallah over Goldstone?, I quoted an Al-Quds al-Arabi report alleging it had been Salam Fayyad who made the decision to kill the Goldstone Report (at least, for now.) But now, a lot of other accounts are coming out tracing the decision to Mahmoud Abbas himself, Abu Mazen.
Al-Jazeera English quoted the head of the human rights department in Qatar’s foreign ministry as very directly attributing the decision to Abu Mazen.
Some accounts (e.g. Al-Jazeera Arabic) have him doing it because he was blackmailed. Some, e.g. Maan, have him doing it because he got diplomatically snookered.
Both those latter accounts, by the way, rely on Israeli sources of unknown veracity, so who knows what his real motivation was? (Another account I’ve seen said the decision was linked to Israeli blackmail over control of the electromagnetic spectrum, and their release of some bandwidth that would have benefited a telecoms venture in which one of his sons is involved.)
Anyway, all four of the factors listed above are, together, responsible for Abu Mazen’s rapidly plunging political fortune.
For him– and for all of us who hoped for a saner US peace diplomacy after the departure of Pres. G.W. Bush from power– Obama’s intervention has been a big disappointment. Actually, for Abu Mazen, it’s far worse than a disappointment. It’s a political catastrophe.
And for the long-suffering people of Palestine? A catastrophe, too. But they will probably see this as the latest in a long series of the catastrophes they’ve suffered, and one that no doubt– at the cost of much, quite avoidable, continued suffering– they will somehow find a way to weather. Their fate is not, after all, totally tethered to the political fortunes of Abu Mazen.

Pathetic sock-puppetry in comments

Somebody calling him/herself variously “Steve Bronfman”, “Edward Newhouse”, and even “A. Jew” has been engaging in pathetic sock-puppetry here, desperately trying to create the impression that there are a number of different commenters here who all share his/her point of view. Persistent commenter Titus/Titan/etc has also engaged in this form of legerdemain, but in a possibly more tongue-in-cheek way.
It is kind of notable that these people (1) take the comments discussions here so seriously that they are ready to invest some serious time in participating, but also (2) feel themselves so outnumbered in the forum of world public opinion that they cannot even enlist friends in their commenting campaign but have to resort to this childish sock-puppetry.
Still, their sock-puppetry is clearly a dishonest way to proceed that violates the most basic norms of civil discourse.

Long knives in Ramallah over Goldstone?

Mahmoud Abbas, who wears the three hats as head of Fateh, president of the interim PA, and head of the PLO, has now “ordered an enquiry” into how it was that the PLO’s rep in Geneva agreed to defer the UN system’s further consideration of the Goldstone report.
So who authorized the decision?
Al-Quds al-Arabi said it was Salam Fayyad, who’s the US-appointed prime minister of the interim PA and in that position has been given an ex-officio seat on the PLO Executive Committee.
As I noted yesterday, Palestinian society– including many of Abbas’s allies– have been in an uproar over the decision. Ramallah PA economy minister Bassem Khoury even reportedly threatened to resign over it.
Anyway, this does seem like another example of Abbas-Fayyad– or perhaps more precisely Fateh-Fayyad– tensions becoming very much more serious in Ramallah.

Jackson Diehl finally loses his sanity?

What happens to someone when he lives in, and imbibes the air of, the Washington bubble for so darn’ long that he completely forgets what the real world looks like? Well, read Jackson Diehl’s piece in Sunday’s waPo, and you can get some idea.
The guy has completely lost touch with the real world!
His lede (lead) is this:

    The Obama administration’s positive tone following its first diplomatic encounter with Iran covers a deep and growing gloom in Washington and European capitals. Seven hours of palaver in Geneva haven’t altered an emerging conclusion: None of the steps the West is considering to stop the Iranian nuclear program is likely to work.
    Not talks. Not sanctions, even of the “crippling” variety the Obama administration has spoken of. Not military strikes. And probably not support for regime change through the still-vibrant opposition.

Who is he hearing this from?
If it is not the voices inside his own sad head, it must be a small coterie of like-minded people who are all that he talks to these days.
I’ve talked to plenty of people in Washington in the past coupe of days. They have all been– to some degree or another– moderately excited by the outcome of Thursday’s P5+1+1 talks in Geneva and hopeful that those talks might help ramp down the tensions between Washington and Iran, avert war, and lead to a more sensible set of relationships between Washington, Iran, and the rest of the world.
I guess we don’t talk to the same people.
But to be honest, Diehl lost the skill of being a good listener, so essential to the journalist’s art, a long time ago. (According to Ken Silverstein, he lost it a long time ago– certainly at some point before 2002, when he became a rah-rah cheerleader for the necessity and benefits of a US invasion of Iraq.)
But now, it’s gotten so that Diehl hears only the voices inside his own head and those voices of others that he can portray as echoing his own idiosyncrasies.
Six paras into his latest piece, he finally gets to discussing last Thursday’s breakthrough talks in Geneva:

    What of Thursday’s talks in Geneva? Iran agreed to international inspections of its new nuclear facility and to ship out of the country some of the uranium it has enriched. Yet those modest concessions may complicate the negotiations and the prospects for sanctions. The headlines about them already obscured the fact that Tehran’s negotiator declined to respond to the central Western demand: that Iran freeze its uranium enrichment work. Iran has rejected that idea repeatedly, and there is no reason to believe the hard-liners in power will change their position.
    In the meantime, talks about the details of inspections and the uranium shipments could easily become protracted, buying the regime valuable time. (On Friday the Associated Press quoted a member of the Iranian delegation as saying it had not, in fact, agreed to the uranium deal.) Meanwhile, Tehran’s tactical retreat has provided Russia and China with an excuse to veto new sanctions — something they would have been hard-pressed to do had Iran struck an entirely defiant tone in Geneva.

Here you truly see the mind of a paranoiac at work… Everyone’s against us! Non-western powers are never to be trusted! They’re all ganging up on us! Etc., etc…
The sad thing is that Jackson Diehl is not just some individual, unconnected voice on the op-ed page. He’s the deputy editor of the WaPo’s editorial page, and for some reason is regarded as a serious voice on foreign affairs throughout much of he Washington political elite.
I guess the new spirit of realism that has been slowly seeping through official Washington has passed him by. Correct that: not merely passed him by, but actually left him very deeply disturbed indeed. As a result, he has retreated even deeper into some neocon-inspired “American Uber Alles” dreamworld, quite unaware that in reality the fate of the country we both love is nowadays deeply interdependent with the fates of non-western powers like China, Russia, and so on.
Deal with it, Jackson.
Deal with the fact that American citizens, constituting less than 5% of humanity, do not have all (or even most) of the answers for all of humankind and we are no longer able to impose our will on the other 95% in the same way that Pres. G. W. Bush so thoughtlessly and arrogantly did– with your enthusiastic approval– for all the years he was in office.
The world’s changed, Jackson Diehl. It would be kinda nice if either you or the WaPo could recognize that and give the new facts of slightly more equal human powers in the world some due recognition.
It would also be great if you could acknowledge and even welcome the fact that, since Thursday, there is serious new hope for de-escalating the tensions between Washington and Iran, and building a new, less conflict-ridden (and therefore, much more humane) set of relationships in the Middle East and Central Asia.
But I, for one, am not going to hang around and wait for you to come to that relaization. Hanging on the every-last-word of the WaPo and its much-vaunted editorial-page team does seem, after all, so very twentieth century.