Just World News with Helena Cobban – Page 63 – Info, analysis, discussion

Obama reading JWN, responding well?

Back on Sunday (July 5), I blogged about Joe Biden’s “loose lips” statements that seemed to many Middle Easterners to give Israel a green light to attack Iran.
I ended the post saying,

Obama now needs to go to some lengths, first to clearly restate that any Israeli strike against Iran is perilous for US lives and interests, and second, to try to get Biden to be a lot more disciplined when he speaks about momentous matters in the future.

Yesterday, Pres. Obama went forcefully on the record to (re-)state that,

“It is the policy of the United States to try to resolve the issue of Iran’s nuclear capabilities in a peaceful way through diplomatic channels.”

From my lips to Obama’s (interestingly sized) ears? Well, maybe, one way or the other.
Of course, a few other Americans also made the same appeal to Obama about Biden’s statement. Including Marc Lynch, who wrote Sunday,

the administration urgently needs to come forward quickly with a restatement of its policy — and make sure the Israelis and others in the region understand it clearly — or else it risks paying some extraordinarily serious costs.

Marc also did a good job there in pulling together the bad effects the Biden statement was already having by then, within the Arabic and Hebrew-language discourse in the Middle East. Which, as I’ve argued elsewhere, is a very important part of the audience for any US leadership pronouncements on matters in that region. (That is, it actually matters a lot more how Israelis, Arabs, and Iranians themselves interpret such statements than it matters whether Juan Cole or others of us here in the US might manage to massage– or not– Biden’s words into a more ‘reasonable’ interpretation.)

Palestinian elections? Not the first priority

I see that my friend Marc Lynch— and perhaps some other people– have gotten a little excited over the new statement by PA/Fateh/PLO head Mahmoud Abbas that he is “ready” to have elections and even to hand over executive and legislative power to Hamas, if it should win.
I think this is a bad way forward.
For anyone who wants to be able to pull a “two state solution” out of the present demographic morass in the West Bank, the top priority now is not the holding of elections to the body whose proper full name– as Mustafa Barghouthi consistently reminds us– is the Palestinian Interim Self-Governing Authority (PISGA). It is, rather, the speedy and effective conclusion of a final-status peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians.
The PISGA, commonly called the “PA”, has been in existence for 15 years now. Its lifespan was originally only meant to be five years.
The 15 years since Yasser Araft and his PLO cronies returned to the West Bank and Gaza, and the 16 years since the conclusion of the Oslo Accord that allowed them to do so, have all seen the pouring of considerable additional concrete into Israel’s settlement-building project in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
That cement continues to be poured. And it will continue to be poured so long as the Palestinians can be fooled into thinking that the petty politics of who controls this interim self-governing authority has any lasting importance.
We Americans have seen in Iraq, in 2004-2005, how an occupying power can use the promise of an imminent “election” to postpone dealing with much more important and far-reaching demands of those who call for liberation from foreign rule.
We have also seen in Iraq how the the occupying power can use “the election gambit” to foment and deepen divisions within the ranks of the occupied people.
Elections are necessarily divisive. The last thing the Palestinian people need right now is for further divisions to be sowed among them.
Yes, there should be a Palestinian vote at some point, hopefully soon. But that vote should be, first and foremost, the referendum over whether to accept or reject the final peace agreement that the Palestinian leadership has negotiated with Israel.
That is the only vote that counts. If the negotiations are speedily concluded it could be held sometime before the end of 2010.
That is certainly what we should all be aiming for– rather than wasting time with planning for and holding yet another round of elections for the interim authority.
Votes for the “legislative” or the “executive” branch of the Palestinian Interim Self-Governing Authority are, after all, only ever as meaningful as Israel allows.
Which, as we saw with the result of the January 2006 vote, was not at all.
So why go through that whole charade again? For what? For that fragile, largely impotent, and always Israel-dependent body called the PISGA/PA?
So if the priority is to conclude the negotiations over the final peace agreement, then who can do that?
Hamas has already said they’re happy for Mahmoud Abbas to go ahead and do the negotiating– provided the final result is submitted to a nation-wide referendum, whose results they say they are quite prepared to abide by.
Personally, I don’t think Abbas has the energy, the spine, or the imagination to conclude the final peace negotiation on his own. He needs a negotiating team that is considerably stronger and more results-focused than the coterie of second-rate (and largely discredited) figures who have done the negotiations with him over the past 16 years. As I suggested here, he could bring in a new team of well-regarded independents who could do the job with and for him.
People who are as well-regarded in the general Palestinian street as Dr. Haidar Abdel-Shafei was back at the time of Madrid. I am not going to name names (though gosh, Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi’s name does keep popping into my mind…. Along with a couple of others.)
Get the peace deal! That has to be the priority.
Then, hold the vote on the results. Not the other way round…. We’ve all seen, too tragically, where that other path has led over the past 15 years.

Central Asia moves center stage

The Obama administration is now decisively shifting the focus of US military activities from Iraq to Afghanistan. That war effort has now significantly affected US-Russian relations: In response to sustained US-NATO pleadings, Russia has now given permission for 4,500 overflights of Russia by US military aircraft every year, in an attempt to maintain US supply lines into Afghanistan that have been severely curtailed by anti-US activities along the road route in Pakistan.
The US military effort in Afghanistan has not been going well. Indeed, it is very clear by now that the gross mis-match between the US-NATO’s over-militarized tools and methods and the real requirements of the Afghan people for peace and stability, the cultural mis-match between NATO powers and Afghanistan’s people, and the sheer length of the US-NATO supply lines into land-locked Afghanistan, between them guarantee that there will be no US military victory there.
And it’s very hard to see the US and NATO as being capable of any other kind of victory, either.
Afghanistan lies at the heart of what, in the 19th century, the British called the “Great Game”, which was a free-wheeling and often very violent contest between Russian power coming down from the north and British power coming up from India.
The “Great Game” was most likely never viewed as particularly enjoyable or fun by the majority-Muslim populations of Central Asia over whose homelands it was fought…
In the early years of the 20th century China started to join the “Game”, as the Han Chinese became able to push their influence deep into the far-west hinterland of their earlier zone of influence.
In the 1980s, when most of the central Asian ‘Stans were still firmly part of the Soviet Union, Afghanistan became a big battle-ground between the Soviet Union and the “west.” In that battle, the US (as we know) threw a lot of resources into supporting the emergence of militant Muslim organizations who were considered of use in the fight against the Soviets.
Now, once again, Central Asia is emerging as a battle-ground between big global powers. My first cut at defining the big players in this contest– which still has a great deal of fluidity– is that they are: the US/”west”; Russia; China; and various forms of indigenous social power, whether Islamic-based or ethnic-based (or some combination.)
We should also note that Iran is a non-trivial actor in Central Asia, as well as in the Persian Gulf.
The past weekend saw the outbreak of some very serious inter-communal clashes in far-west China, in what the Chinese call the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. These mainly pitted indigenous Uighurs against Han Chinese immigrants.

Continue reading “Central Asia moves center stage”

Women in the war zone: Gaza

Kudos to the BBC for publishing an agonizing (and agonized) short interview with Tihani Abed Rabbu, described as “bereaved mother’ in Gaza. Scroll down here to find it.
(But can anyone at the BBC tell me on what basis they placed her interview last and lowest on the page beneath two that seemed far less interesting to me– but that were conducted with, you guessed it, men… And guess what, the first of the men theyfeatured was an outspoken critic of Hamas. I wonder why that placed that one at the top??)
Anyway, scroll on down and read about the anguish of a mother from, obviously, the Abed Rabbu family, whose compound was afflicted so harshly by the Israeli war of last December/January.
Imagine the anguish of this woman, seeing not only the effects the Israeli assault has had but also the effects within her own family of the continuing Hamas-Fateh split– one that has been so assiduously cultuvated by Israel and its western backers.
Here is some of what she says:

I have reflected for many years now on the importance of the experiences that women residents of war-zones have to go through when the war comes into the heart of their communities and frequently, including in this case, right into their families.
These reflections arose from the experience I myself had, trying to work as a journalist and run a household and co-raise my young children in the heart of the war-zone that Beirut was back in those days. In my husband’s family– as in Ms. Abed-Rabbu’s– there were supporters of both the different sides in the internal Lebanese war. I can deeply relate to her desire that those rifts be healed.
Too frequently decisionmakers in the MSM simply marginalize women’s experiences. But women’s work in holding families together in very tough times lies at the heart of the social resiliency that can either save or break a community that’s in conflict. So it is not only a compelling ‘human interest’ story– it is also at the heart of the big ‘political’ story regarding whether, for example, the people of Gaza or South Lebanon end up bowing to Israel’s very lethally pursued political demands, or not.
Maybe the BBC could, at the very least, elevate Ms. Abed-Rabbu’s story to the top of that page?

IPS piece on Biden and Iraq

… You can find it here, and archived here.
I know I haven’t written much about Iraq recently. So I really welcomed the opportunity to do so today.
I also think I need to write more about the US’s disastrous war in Afghanistan– though I don’t think that will fit into the arrangement I have with IPS, which is limited to the Middle East.
For this one, given that I was up against a deadline that turned out to be more brutal than I’d expected, I was really glad to be able to quote some from our longtime JWN friend Reidar Visser’s very relevant and timely analysis of Iraqis’ fears of muhasasa. I translated that (after a quick consultation with Hans Wehr) as “apportionment”– and in the IPS piece I said it seemed very similar to the “confessional” system (ta’ifiyyeh) in Lebanon.
Of course, in the IPS piece there were many aspects of the Iraq story that I had no room to include. I should probably come back and write more about it in the months ahead than I have done recently.

Deadly hijabophobia in Germany

Many westerners suffer from an irrational fear of headscarved women (‘hijabophobia’). But fortunately very few have gone as far as a 28-year-old German identified only as “Axel W” who last week stabbed and killed a hijab-wearing Egyptian woman, along with the three-month-old fetus she was pregnant with.
And he did this inside a German courtroom, of all places.
I do not understand why anyone should want to “protect” this guy by withholding his full name.
The fully-named victim, 31-year-old Marwa Sherbini, received no useful protections at all for her life or that of her fetus during her time in the courtroom, where Axel W was appealing a fine of 750 euros ($1,050), imposed for insulting her in 2008, “apparently because she was wearing the Muslim headscarf or Hijab.”
I also can’t understand how Axel W managed to get a knife into the courtroom and then to use it 18 times against Ms. Sherbini’s person, killing her and the fetus, before the police were able to gain control over him. Where were the police all that time? Were there no guards standing anywhere near him during the hearing– and this despite his previously proven hostility to Ms. Sherbini?
Ms. Sherbini’s husband was also present, along with their three-year-old son. The husband tried to save her but was reportedly injured both by Axel W and when a policeman opened fire in the courtroom. What a fiasco for the German “justice” system, and what a horrendous tragedy for Ms. Sherbini’s family and friends.

Molavi’s question

In a July 4th Washington Post oped, the excellent Iranian-American journalist Afshin Molavi writes of how Iran’s fitful struggle for freedom is well in-grained within Iran’s history and political culture.

“It’s important to recognize the Iranian struggle for what it is: a grass-roots, vital movement for greater liberty enriched by more than a century of struggle against foreign powers, autocratic kings and repressive theocrats. Iran’s rulers would have the world believe that the protesters are a minority inspired by foreigners, but this denies a fundamental piece of Iranian history.”

I agree. Molavi then asks the question of the day — “Who will stand with Iranians?”

“Last month I attended a candlelight vigil to honor those who died fighting for freedom. The gathering was somber yet hopeful, but it was still too narrowly Iranian. We need more Americans… If there is one issue that politically polarized America ought to be able to rally around, it is the gallant struggle of Iranians.”

I concur in part; most of the protests thus far are far too… “Iranian,” perhaps because of the organizational model of most Iran focused interest groups. (To get invited, it helps to be “Iranian.”) In the western protests thus far, we often can see demonstrators splitting along factional lines, sometimes violently, as largely incompatible political agendas of monarchists, mujahedin, komali, liberals, secularists, etc. come to the fore.
Yet if such divides could be surmounted in common support for Iranians, what exactly would Molavi have us do?
Human rights groups are planning mass rallies in the west for July 25th. What exactly will be the message of such solidarity? How will such rallies help?

Continue reading “Molavi’s question”

Joe Biden’s loose lips

When Barack Obama first named Joe Biden as his running-mate, Washington insiders noted that what Biden is best known for running is his gab-too-much motor-mouth. Too often it seems there is no brain-filter operating to control what comes out of it.
Yesterday, Biden (three-peatedly) told George Stephanopoulos that if the Israeli government chooses to launch a military strike– that is, an act of war– against Iran, then that is quite up to them.
Here’s the first part of the exchange, as transcribed by Politico:

Actually, no, Joe. “Any nation” is certainly not entitled to undertake an unprovoked act of war against another nation…
Biden should have remembered, too, that our country has its own direct interests and responsibilities in this matter, for at least three excellent reasons:

It is not clear to me why Biden has suddenly become so irresponsibly mouthy about Iran. Back in early April, soon after Benjamin Netanyahu’s inauguration as Israeli PM, Biden was the administration’s point-man in issuing a clear warning that Netanyahu would be “ill-advised” to carry out a military strike against Iran. (Also reported here.)
And today, even as George Stephanopoulos’s show was airing in the US, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was openly warning about the very “destabilizing” effects of any Israeli attack on Iran.
Here’s his exchange with ‘Face the Nation’ host John Dickerson:

all of us will have to deal with that.

Mullen’s position is considerably more in line with the one that has been sustained since Obama’s inauguration by his own immediate boss, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and Gates’s boss, the president, than the one that Biden blurted out yesterday.
Bottom line: If it is still true that– as the old WWII adage had it– “loose lips sink ships”, then the ships that are likely to be sunk if Netanyahu takes Biden’s latest motor-mouthing as giving him a green light to go ahead and bomb Iran are much more likely to be American ships, than Israeli.
Bidens apparent gaffe is all the more notable because since the early days of the recent political crisis in Iran, the many US naval vessels in the Gulf have been under strict orders to hang back and take extra precautions against getting into any confrontation with the Iranian navy and military, since the hardliners in Tehran could then use any such confrontation to rally more Iranians behind their cause.
Obama now needs to go to some lengths, first to clearly restate that any Israeli strike against Iran is perilous for US lives and interests, and second, to try to get Biden to be a lot more disciplined when he speaks about momentous matters in the future.

Reading Independence Day in Iran

(this is Scott Harrop writing)
Keyed to Ameica’s 4th of July celebration, I have the pleasure of publishing an essay with R.K. Ramazani that is appearing in multiple outlets via Agence Global. One version can be found here. Between us, we’ve condensed about eighty years of studies of the American and Iranian revolutionary experiences into a few short paragraphs.
Our core observations in this essay boil down to:

1. Americans and Iranians have much more in common with each other than either side realizes.
2. Both nations have “revolutionary” traditions that first and foremost were about achieving independence. I wrote in greater detail about the American side two years ago here at justworldnews.
3. Even as both countries over time believed that their revolutions stood for distinct values that they’ve offered to the world, both America and Iran have painful track records of not fully living up to their own norms. Professor Ramazani recently wrote about Iran’s freedom deficit here.
4. International legitimacy… matters. Both societies care deeply about their reputation in the world, even as leaders in both countries have conducted themselves in manners than have hurt their nation’s prestige before the world. The world indeed is watching.
5. Howard Baskerville was right; Americans and Iranians do share many ideals, of independence, constitutionalism, justice, faith, and yes, liberty. (See my backgrounder on the 100th anniversary of his “martydom” in Tabriz)
6. Iran’s present crisis is home grown; lasting solutions to the present crisis must come from within. Yet it’s one Americans can recognize and empathize with from the outside.

Consider reading the actual whole text and give us your feedback. This is just the first hints of larger works being hatched.

Something a lot better than grandstanding…

… is grand-sitting, which is what I’ve been doing for the past three days.
My grand-daughter Matilda is now eight months old, and totally adorable.
I had forgotten how much WORK baby-care can be. Yup, this reminds me (once again) just how darn wrong Thomas Hobbes was when he defined the “human condition” by saying that “men grow like mushrooms out of the ground.”
Baloney! Who looked after Thomas Hobbes when he was a baby? Who tended him, fed him, hugged him, supervised him, taught him the language in which later he would communicate and indeed make his nice easy living… Who?
Another human person, that’s who. Most likely, a female person. Most likely, his mother… And as was the case with just about all the other philosophers of the western “Enlightenment”, he completely ignored the real work that is involved in child-rearing– along with the rights of the (overwhelmingly female) people who still do it to this day.
No way you can discuss the “human condition” unless you take into account– and give due honor to– the work people do in rearing the young and tending the old, sick, and infirm. Then, once you’ve done that, there’s no way you could think that the condition of being “human” is one of being self-sufficient and meeting all other humans on an essentially equal playing field… No way you could be a market fundamentalist, either…
Anyway, I know you all want to know how Matilda’s doing. She’s amazingly fearless and determined to physically explore the world around her, using her four limbs, her mouth, and on occasion the full weight of her head.
Her legs are sturdy after kicking a whole lot both after and before her birth. So now, she’s pulling herself up onto her feet in the crib and doing some little wobbly steps of proto-walking (while hanging onto the crib bars with at least one hand.)
She’s crawling quite well, though still tentatively.
She’s amazingly sociable and good-natured, and favors everyone with a big smile.
Right now, her fourth tooth is just coming in– It’s the right front tooth on the top. Her two middle bottom teeth are well in, so her open-mouth smile is particularly adorable.
With the new teeth coming down from her top jaw, she’s evidently fascinated by what’s happening inside her mouth. So often, now, when she smiles, she does so in a coy, closed-mouth way that allows her to carry on enjoying the movements of her tongue around the inside of her mouth.
I’ve been trying to stretch her hand-using capabilities. The one hand action she’s easily able to imitate is ‘drumming’ the hand on some nicely reverberating surface. When I open and close my fingers in a kind of stylized “bye-bye” hand-wave, she doesn’t yet imitate me by raising her hand in the air, but you can see her starting to work (in this case, a little more than twitch) her fingers.
When I sing her the French children’s song “Ainsi font, font, font, les petites marionettes… ” with the twirling-hand hand-gestures that go with it, she is always, without exception, fascinated by my turning hands. (Okay, most likely not by my singing voice.) But while she watches my hands closely, she doesn’t (yet) seem to be making any attempt to imitate the gestures.
I am fascinated by the whole theory of mirror neurons and the role they may or may not play in mimetic learning.
But mainly, I’m just really amazed by this whole process of grand-parenting. Thoughts of human continuity, appreciation for my foreparents, and concerns for the world that this little girl is going to be becoming an adult in all come crowding into my head.
I had a small number of these “universalist”-type thoughts back when I was the mother of small kids. But that situation was one marked by so much sleep deprivation, uncertainty, anxiety, and just plain stress that I really did not have time to dwell on those thoughts much, or articulate them in any focused way.
Grand-parenting: I can’t recommend the experience highly enough. (And if you don’t have grand-babies of your own to play with, remember there are always plenty of babies in tough home and community situations who need your loving attention in places other than a family member’s home.)