Just World News with Helena Cobban – Page 90 – Info, analysis, discussion

Learning Peace Lingo

In furthering my study of peace agencies I delved further into the US Institute for Peace. The USIP held a conference in January, “Passing the Baton — Foreign Policy Challenges and Opportunities Facing the New Administration.” I figured that would be a good place to start.
The event convened nearly 1900 participants and a “high-level, bipartisan group of current and former U.S. foreign policy officials and practitioners.” The web site which recorded the results of the conference featured several photos of one paticipant in particular, General David Petraeus in his uniform with its many rows of colorful ribbons. A peace institute conference on “Foreign Policy Challenges and Opportunities” featuring a warmaker! That was a clue to some of what followed.
The conference included panel discussions of several topics. I was particularly interested in Morning Panel 3: “Stabilizing War-Torn States: Goals and Guidance for a New Administration.” This panel included an army general (not Petraeus, another one), a “senior program officer” from USIP and a university assistant professor.

Continue reading “Learning Peace Lingo”

ICRC head Kellenberger (and Rabbani) on the Gaza crisis

Our friend Christiane writes from Lausanne, Switzerland, that she has found– and translated for us– an important interview about Gaza conducted with Jakob Kellenberger, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). You can find her great translation (very lightly edited by me), here. Big thanks for your work there, Christiane!
I assume that most JWN readers realize that the ICRC holds a very special position among international non-governmental organizations because, since the very beginning of the codification of International Humanitaran Law (IHL, aka the ‘Laws of War’) in the 1850s, all the governments that have signed onto these important treaties– the ‘Hague’ series, the ‘Geneva’ series, etc– have thereby agreed that the Geneva-based ICRC will be the depositary and, if you like, the trustee for the whole process. No other NGO occupies anything like such an authoritative role in interpreting and guarding the integrity of IHL.
The ICRC and the whole emerging body of IHL importantly predated both the establishment of the League of Nations (which occurred after World war I) and that of the UN in 1945. Thus, even before there were global inter-governmental organizations of that sort there was IHL, and there was the ICRC in a position to act as continuing guarantor of the important protections IHL provides to those who are victims of war. Granted, its performance has often in the past been flawed– most notably, during many of the vicious counter-insurgency campaigns that European powers waged against national independence movements over the first 120 years of the ICRC’s existence, and its performance during the European Holocaust against the Jewish, Roma, gays, and handicapped populations of Nazi-ruled countries. But over time the ICRC has worked much more fully to underline and work for the equal concern for all human persons that is, after all, one of its foundational values.
Kellenberger was the only head of any human-rights or humanitarian organization who made a point of going to visit Gaza in person at the earliest time he could, to assess the consequences of the Israeli assault on the Strip’s population.
Anyway, here is the link to the original French version of the Kellenberger interview, which was published in the Swiss daily 24 heures, yesterday.
Christiane writes, ” To sum it up, Kellenberger is issuing the same call as Helena concerning Gaza.” That is, I’m assuming, the point he makes about the urgency of the need for a political solution of the problem faced by Gazans (and all other Palestinians.) Though there certainly is currently a physical-needs humanitarian crisis in Gaza of the highest order, as I’ve noted before the crisis is not only, and indeed not even centrally, one of the basic human needs of Gaza’s 1.5 million people. It is quintessentially a political crisis.
Gaza’s humanitarian crisis has been deliberately caused and exacerbated by the intentional policies of siege, encirclement, and physical destruction that successive Israeli governments have pursued toward its civilian population; and it could be ended quickly and successfully if those policies were abandoned. Gaza is not the drought-torn Sahel. Its population is well educated and– until the latest Israeli assault– it had a pretty good infrastructure capable of supporting rapid socio-economic reconstruction and development. Those assets could all be rapidly reactivated if Israel would only lift the siege and agree to reasonable and sustainable terms to stabilize the very fragile parallel-ceasefire situation created on January 18.
On a related note, I have just read the sharp criticism that Mouin Rabbani (formerly with the Crisis Group) has just written, of the way that Human Rights Watch has dealt with Israel-related concerns over the years, including during the Gaza crisis.
Rabbani raises some of the same criticisms that I’ve raised about HRW in the past, though his analysis of the organization’s one-sidedness is much deeper than anything I have ever written.
Human Rights Watch does, without a doubt, do a lot of good work in the Middle East. For that reason I recently accepted an invitation from the organization to stay on their Middle East advisory committee for a further year. However, many of the criticisms that Rabbani raises are well documented, and serious. His analysis of the tentativeness of the language with which HRW raises the “possibility” of Israeli infractions of IHL, versus the often strident tone with which it denounces possible infractions by Arab actors, is particularly thought-provoking; and my advice to my colleagues and friends at HRW is that they engage very seriously with these criticisms if they want their work to be widely respected throughout the whole Middle East.

Obama, act now for peace and humanity!

When Israel was still bombing Gaza full-bore, back until two days before the end of George Bush’s presidency, president-elect Barack Obama said he did not want to adopt any kind of public position on the war because “We have only one president at a time.”
Now, he is it.
Israelis go to the polls on February 10. The parallel-but-unnegotiated ceasefires announced by Hamas and Israel on January 18 are looking very shaky indeed. Israel’s Military Intelligence has reported that it is the non-Hamas groups that have continued launching some hostile acts (an ambush, some small-scale rockets) against Israel since January 18. Today, Israeli PM Ehud Olmert promised to undertake “disproportionate” retaliation against Gaza for the latest rocket attack from Gaza, sendung warplanes against Southern gaza and threatening even greater escalations over the days ahead.
Olmert himself is not running in the upcoming election, though he is campaigning desperately to save the “legacy” of a term as PM that was stained by the strategic debacle of the 2006 war against Lebanon and the corruption charges that have snapped ever closer and closer to his own heels (and which forced him to step down as head of Kadima some months ago.)
Though Olmert is not running, his colleague at the head of Kadima, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, most certainly is. And so is Labour Party head Ehud Barak, currently the Defense Minister. Since January 18, this troika has come in for considerable criticism from Israel’s hard-right parties who claim– with some justification– that they did not “finish the job” they started when they launched the war december 27, in terms of suppressing the ability of the Palestinian militants to fire their (often home-made) projectiles against Israel.
Over the past few years the major political momentum inside Israel– including among an apparently broad swathe of the Jewish-Israeli public– has been pushing toward ever more hawkish stances and actions, though there are now, as always, several significant voices in the country that point out that suppressing the Palestinians’ will to resist Israel’s occupation and siege is an unachievable task and therefore Israel should seek to engage Hamas in negotiations.
But what of Barack Obama? Now, as the violence starts to re-escalate, he needs to speak out forcefully for de-escalation, and for a return to authoritative final-status peace negotiations, human solidarity, and calm.
He needs to do this before February 10, otherwise the bellophilia that has been holding so many Israelis in its thrall might sweep a very heavily rightwing and anti-withdrawal government into power.
He needs to do it now, to try to knock some sense into the heads of the current Israeli government, who throughout eight years of the Bush presidency got used to having a complete “carte blanche” from Washington, regardless of the serious bad effects that their actions had on US interests spread throughout the region. (For many years now, Washington has been overwhelmingly the main provider of help to Israel at the military, political, and financial levels. Everyone in the world knows that.)
Obama also needs to do this now because the people of Gaza are still suffering. During the recent war, Israel– using overwhelmingly US-supplied weaponry– bombed thousands of their homes and businesses and the physical facilities of many of their major social institutions to smithereens. People are in tents, and the Gaza winters can be biting cold. The work of physical and social reconstruction urgently needs to get underway– but the Olmert government still won’t allow even basic construction materials to pass into the Strip.
There is an urgent humanitarian crisis in Gaza. But the crisis is not the kind of “humanitarian” issue that can be dealt with only by endlessly sending food and hygiene supplies in to Gaza’s people. It is, at its core, part of the deep and continuing political crisis of the Palestinian people– a crisis that has been awaiting an authoritative political resolution for 61 years now.
Obama did despatch Sen. George Mitchell to the region for a “listening tour,” last Monday. So I hope that, even though Mitchell is still in the Middle East, he has already been able to convey back to Obama some of the urgency of the situation he has found there.
But now, even before Mitchell gets back to Washington DC, Obama needs to start speaking out: for de-escalation, for a true spirit of human solidarity with the peoples of Gaza and of Israel, for strengthening the ceasefire in Gaza, and for launching a top-priority, international project to secure the terms of a final-status peace between Israelis and Palestinians within the next nine months.
Diplomatic delay has always been fatal on this issue. The US has only one president. President Obama: step up to the plate now!

Iran Revolution at 30: Beyond Paradox

Washington’s venerable Middle East Institute has released a stunning collection of essays entitled, The Iranian Revolution at 30. Featuring diverse contributions from 53 international scholars and policy participants, the collection is dedicated to my own mentor, R.K. Ramazani. (the reputed “Dean of Iran Foreign Policy Studies”)
Andrew Parasiliti’s dedication essay to Ramazani appears on page 10, and the Professor’s extraordinary essay on “Understanding Iranian foreign policy” is featured at page. 12. My own essay on former President Khatami as a bridge “beyond paradox” appears on page 115.
Topics covered among the 53 essays range from foreign policy to societal trends, internal politics, the status of women, economy, and regional dynamics. Editor John Calabrese has brought together a nice mix of familiar and newer voices, providing a splendid array of insights and facts to consider.
Among the sub-themes that recur frequently is that of “paradox.” As I note in my essay, observers

“often emphasize apparent Iranian paradoxes to alert outsiders to Iran’s vibrant and dynamic society, beyond the static, enigmatic “black” clichés so commonly clung to in popular Western discourse.
In the same country where current President Mahmud Ahmadinejad trivialized the Holocaust, a very popular television program sympathetically portrayed an Iranian diplomat who rescued Jews from the Nazis during World War II.”

Yet the emphasis on “paradox” can be used to conceal more than reveal. Abbas Milani’s essay (26), among several, contends that Iran’s core paradoxes are so unresolvable that they inevitably (in Milani’s view) will “bring about its end.”
I take a rather different approach:

“Paradox as a metaphor for Iran becomes less than helpful if it leaves the impression of a ‘hidden Iran’ being incomprehensively mired in its own contradictions. Bewildered perhaps by such analytical frameworks, top Western officials, beginning with former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, commonly admit that “they do not understand Iran” or that they “do not know” if negotiating with Iran will work.”

I illustrate how paradoxes can be transcended via remarks given by former Iranian President Muhammad Khatami at a Monticello luncheon, on September 11th, 2006. Other than Helena’s blog entry at the time, this is the first time that Khatami’s comments at Thomas Jefferson’s home have been published.
Painfully aware of the past problems, Khatami optimistically sees no contradiction between the requirements of democracy and “a progressive reading of Islam.” Curious? Read my essay (p. 115). It’s also been republished (here.)
Bonus Observations:

Continue reading “Iran Revolution at 30: Beyond Paradox”

Peace Now!

The US government doesn’t seem inclined to back off its all-war, all-the-time policy. It’s even got some of us thinking about war too much of the time. Me, anyhow.
It’s time we thought more about peace, isn’t it? . . .Down By The Riverside.

Doing a little research, I learned that there is a United States Institute of Peace! Who knew? Perhaps you did, but I didn’t. And apparently I’m not the only one, judging from the title of this NY Times article from last June: Below the Radar: A Federal Peace Agency

Continue reading “Peace Now!”

My IPS analysis on Obama’s Middle East policy so far

Read it here.

Insight on George Mitchell

I had a really informative talk yesterday with Shelley Deane, a prof at Bowdoin College in Maine who’s one of the world’s leading “George Mitchell scholars.” An Irish citizen, Deane wrote her doctoral dissertation at LSE on Mitchell’s role in brokering Northern Ireland’s “Good Friday Agreement.” Right now, she has unique access to all the records of the commission he co-chaired with Warren Rudman, at the invitation of Pres. Clinton, to look into the causes of the Second Palestinian Intifada. Along the way, she has also done a lot of work on the general topic of “Paramilitaries to Parliamentaries” and other issues in complex peacemaking. (Check her publications list at the link above.)
Now, of course, Mitchell is in the hot seat as Barack Obama’s quick-off-the-blocks special envoy to the Middle East. It’s a task to which he brings his long experience as a US Senator (including a stint as Senate Majority Leader), his ultimately successful peace-brokering record in Northern Ireland, and the very granular experience of Israeli-Palestinian issues– and of its interaction with US politics at the highest levels– that he gained during his work on the Mitchell-Rudman Commission.
Deane said she’s identified several key of the personal qualities that have aided Mitchell’s approach to peace-brokering. The main ones are his persistence, his friendly and unflappable temperament, his commitment to building longterm relations of trust, his deep personal decency, and his very strong preference for approaches that inclusive, even-handed, and values-based. (My wording there, not always hers.)
She said that Mitchell’s approach is to create a “hyperbaric chamber– because when you’re in the depths of a conflict you can’t just rise to the surface immediately, or you’d ‘get the bends’. So you have to create this hyperbaric chamber, hopefully including all the relevant parties, as a safe place where relationships of trust can be built over time.”
She noted that he’d experienced many serious setbacks during his efforts in Northern Ireland, but had calmly persisted with the job nonetheless.
She said he places strong emphasis on trust and trustworthiness, and was upset though not thrown off balance by instances of Israeli “spoiler-leaking” that had occurred during Israeli-Palestinian discussions that had been intended to be kept quiet.
She talked quite a bit about the similarities she sees between Hamas and Northern Ireland’s Sinn Fein, including the strength of their internal discipline, their lack of corruption, and the fact that both organizations, by design, refused to establish a patronage- and fiefdom-based internal structure. But she also talked about the structural differences between the Northern Ireland situation and that in Israel/Palestine, including the fact that in Northern Ireland both blocs of major protagonists– the “Unionists” and the Sinn Fein/IRA– had important state systems behind them; and the situation there was not exactly one in which one protagonist was running a military occupation over the other. (The role of the British Army in Northern Ireland was much more nuanced than that; and anyway, the major reconciliation that needed to occur was between the opposing local forces, not between the entire indigenous population and a foreign occupation army.)
It strikes me this question of the structural differences between the two situations is one worth quite a lot more study. But I need to run now. (I’m going to a talk Jimmy Carter;s main Middle east person, Bob Paster, is giving about Hamas.)
More on all of this, later. However, the next few days look pretty busy for me…

Possible US military attack against Somalia? Not again!!

Steve Clemons and Bernhard of Moon of Alabama have both been writing about the possibility that the new Obama administration might launch some form of attack against ground targets in desperately war-torn Somalia.
Please God, no! Does no-one in this White House have a memory that stretches back to 1993, when a newly inaugurated Bill Clinton thought that– especially as a Democrat with a previous pro-peace record– he needed to “show some spine” and turn the US’s existing aid-protection mission in Somalia into a war-fighting “compellence” mission instead?
With disastrous effect.
Wikipedia reminds us (footnotes removed) that,

Pres. Clinton’s childish and destructive “spine-demonstration” exercise in Somalia turned out very badly indeed for Somalia. As did the “compellence by proxy” mission that Pres. George W. Bush launched against the country in December 2006, using the Ethiopian invasion army as his proxy.
Clinton’s completely needless chest-baring exercise in Somalia also turned out very badly for the US. With Somali politics thrown into uproar after the July assault, by October the US military (and White House) had decided on another raid, this time to try to capture two key aides to Aidid from a house they were in, in Mogadishu. That raid, codenamed ‘Operation Gothic Serpent‘ was a complete and embarrassing fiasco. Two US helicopters were downed and there was a very serious lack of communication and coordination between US ground and heli-borne units– and also, between US units and the Pakistani and Malaysian troops who were supposed to be their allies in that nominally UN force. A total of 18 US servicemen– and many, many more Somalis– were killed. Clinton’s attempt to demonstrate US military capabilities and resolve was quickly abandoned as he turned back to using much more diplomatic means to try to de-escalate the Somali situation.
That mad, destructive, and completely avoidable firefight then became the subject of the book and movie “Black Hawk Down.”
Another consequence of Clinton’s childish attempt to “show US muscle” in Somalia in 1993 was that the US military (and Clinton) then became extremely casualty averse. To the extent that the following April, when Gen. Romeo Dallaire, commander of the UN’s small peacekeeping force in Rwanda, was crying out for reinforcements in the lead-up to and the early days of the genocide there, Clinton and Madeleine Albright worked actively at the UN to have Dallaire’s force completely disbanded, instead. Their “fear” was that even if there were no US units in the UN force in Rwanda, the US would somehow get sucked into it, and US troops might end up dying as they tried to save Rwandan lives.
(Actually, people who join an all-volunteer military like that in the US do so knowing full well that they might die on the job. That’s part of the deal. Also, Dallaire was able to hang onto a much-reduced skeleton force in Rwanda, which saved thousands of lives– though not nearly as many as it could have, if he’d been sent the reinforcements he’d begged for.)
The damaging legacy of “Gothic Serpent” lived on for many years, and in many different ways… both in Somalia and far beyond.
So please, please, President Obama, don’t even contemplate launching any kind of new military attack against Somalia– whether under the pretext of “fighting piracy” or any other pretext.
There are plenty of nonviolent ways to address any problems the international community faces in (and from the shores of) Somalia. Another war is not the answer. Plus, you have absolutely no need to “prove” anything, in a chest-thumping militaristic way. We elected you to solve problems, not create new ones; and most of us who elected you did so based on your promise to find nonviolent ways to resolve tricky conflicts, to de-escalate international tensions, and to build better relations of mutual respect and respect with the other nations of the world.
We certainly did not elect you to launch another US military attack against Somalia.

ElBaradei shows the way: Boycott the BBC!

IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei has cancelled two interviews he was scheduled to give to the BBC, over the Beeb’s refusal to air the charity appeal for Gaza.
Excellent decision, Mr. ElBaradei. How many other decisionmakers and “news sources” around the world will now follow suit?
Lots, I hope.
I’m just trying to figure out if news consumers should also join this boycott. I think so.

BBC: Land of pure lunacy!

You totally have to hand it to the BBC that they have an advanced case of the Monty Pythons… Today, they have a lengthy piece of analysis on their website titled “Who will rebuild Gaza?”
The bolded intro para says this:

Even as aid agencies struggle to meet the immediate needs of those left injured, homeless and traumatised by the Israeli operation in Gaza, concerns are growing that reconstruction efforts could become bogged down in a complex political tangle.

What, BBC? Aid to Gaza getting “bogged down in politics”?
Do you guys have no sense of self-awareness, no sense of shame at all??
The BBC Board of Governors has been busy for many days now blocking all attempts by a coalition of blue-chip UK charities to air a short fundraising video for Gaza on the Beeb’s government-provided airwaves.
This latest piece of analysis makes no mention of the BBC’s shameful role.