Because the war on Gaza has turned out to be very “good” for Labour leader Ehud Barak’s popularity, boosting his chances in the Feb. 10th election… But Barak has seemingly taken most of that support away from Kadima, which previously was the main challenger to Likud’s lead in the opinion polls. So now, Likud’s lead is even stronger. (Despite Barak’s “war boost”, Labour still lags far behind the two front-runners… )
I actually predicted this, verbally, a couple of weeks ago. Wish I’d blogged it at the time.
The war was all along a win-win prospect for the ever-hawkish Likud. It strengthened and stoked the hard-line racism and bellophilia that’s so widely present in (much of) Israeli society. Which strengthens Likud and the parties even further to its right. Plus, basically, there’s no way that either Labour or Kadima could out-Likud Likud. So Likud was bound to do well out of their horrendous attempt to do so with the recent war…
That is the situation that now so urgently needs turning around by determined and principled action on behalf of all the international community, to rein in these murderous impulses unleashed in Israeli society. The US government, which has been Israel’s main enabler, backer, and international shield through all its wars of choice from 1982 through 2008/9, needs to start taking responsibility for its actions. The US policy on Arab-Israeli issues over the past 27 years has enabled and allowed all those Israeli “wars of choice.” It has also enabled and allowed the pursuit by successive Israeli governments of a colonial settlement-planting project in the occupied Palestinian and Syrian lands that has caused huge amounts of harm to the land’s rightful residents and has considerably complicated the search for a sustainable final peace agreement.
The time to secure that final peace is now. Not next year, but now.
Palestinian politics and the rest of the war’s political endgame
This morning the time-expired PA president, Mahmoud Abbas of Fateh, called for the establishment of a Palestinian national unity government. The political endgame of Israel’s 22-Day War against Gaza has begun in earnest on the Palestinian side.
(On the Israeli side, the whole war can be understood as an internal political game, with the “end” of that game being focused on the general election of February 10.)
All wars are about politics: Clausewitz 101. In Israel’s 22-Day War against Gaza, one major war goal was– as Olmert and others repeatedly said– to “change the situation” regarding the politics of Gaza and the rest of Palestine. That was, to change it in a radically anti-Hamas and probably pro-Fateh way.
Remember that ever since Hamas’s victory in the January 2006 parliamentary elections, Israel and its Bush administration backers have waged a strongly anti-Hamas campaign, including maintaining the brutal siege of Gaza, arming and training Fateh militias and police in order to set them against Hamas, attempting (but failing to bring off) a coup against Hamas in Gaza in 2007, etc, etc.
The 22-Day War was a continuation of that anti-Hamas campaign.
The IDF’s violent and damaging rampage against Gaza did not, however, succeed in either crushing Hamas or forcing it to surrender. But it did considerably weaken the political situation of Mahoud Abbas and his Fateh colleagues– both within the Palestinian public and among the broader Arab and Muslim publics.
So that is the importance of Abbas’s terse call for a Palestinian national unity government.
Last night, elected Hamas PM Ismail Hanniyeh declared the outcome of the war a “victory” for the Palestinian people. He added that this victory would be,
- a springboard towards the restoration of national unity and the launch of internal dialog in order to reach genuine and comprehensive national reconciliation.
So both major Palestinian parties are now expressing their support for, apparently, a speedy reconciliation between them. This is excellent, even though the terms of the reconciliation remain to be worked out.
The last time the two sides attempted national reconciliation it was through the (Saudi-sponsored) Mecca Agreement of February 2007. Under that agreement, Haniyeh was the PM but the crucial Foreign Affairs portfolio was given to pro-Fateh independent Ziad Abu Amr, and there was a clear understanding that Hamas would encourage the Abbas-Abu Amr team to negotiate the very best possible peace deal with Israel that should then be submitted to a Palestinian national referendum.
It was that agreement that was ripped apart by Fateh’s Washington-instigated coup attempt in Gaza just four months later.
After foiling the coup attempt, the Gaza-based Haniyeh then established his own, Hamas-dominated PA government in Gaza while Abbas formed a rival, US-supported PA government in the West Bank and resumed his participation in the chronically unending “peace” negotiations with Israel.
Abbas’s term as elected PA president ran out on January 9, so there are now considerable questions about the legitimacy of his claim to “represent” Palestinians.
Hamas, now relatively strengthened by its survival of Israel’s assault on Gaza, now looks as though it is inclined to throw the badly weakened Abbas a political lifeline. (This would parallel the policies that Hizbullah, in Lebanon, pursued toward Lebanese PM Fouad Siniora in the aftermath of the– politically very similar– Israeli assault on that country in 2006.) Hamas may well now allow Abbas to “front” for a unified Palestinian participation in all the big diplomacy that lies ahead, while Hamas can focus more of its energies on the much-needed tasks of physical and social reconstruction in Palestine.
The constitutional situation within the PA is badly complicated by the fact that Israel has held in prison since 2007 either all or nearly all of the two dozen pro-Hamas parliamentarians, elected in January 2006, who were resident in the West Bank. That includes Parliament Speaker Aziz Dweik.
It strikes me that a first demand for the Palestinian national unity government– one that democrats around the world should support unconditionally– is that Israel should immediately release all the elected Palestinian parliamentarians whom it now holds captive. (Possibly, their release could be part of a broader detainee-release program that would also involve Israel’s Hamas-held POW, Gilad Shalit.)
Meanwhile, as noted above, the political endgame of the war on the Israeli side will be continuing until February 10, and quite possibly after that, during the cumbersome coalition-forming process that follows all elections in Israel. The Likud party has been chafing in opposition in Israel as Kadima and Labour have led this highly popular (in Israel) war. Immediately after the ceasefire started, its leaders quite predictably started criticizing the Kadima-Labour team for “not having gone far enough, and not having finished the job.”
It’s not clear yet what effect this pressure from Likud will have on the stability of the– tenuous, un-negotiated, and parallel– brace of ceasefires that went into operation yesterday. But I fear it can’t be a good one.
What is clear to me is that almost-President Obama should, as an early order of business very soon after his inauguration tomorrow, start laying out a specifically American vision of the urgency of securing a final peace between Israel and all its neighbors, along with some of the principles on which this peace should be based. They should include the folloowing:
- — Land for peace, and the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war;
— Security for all the people of the region, including both Israelis and Palestinians;
— A complete end to the use of force between Israel and its neighbors, with the establishment of robust and accountable mechanisms that can verify that aggressive actions are not being prepared;
— Jerusalem to be shared as a focal point for respect, coexistence, and dialogue among all the world’s nations and religions…
Obama should, ideally, lay out these ideas in a public speech that he personally gives on the subject considerably before February 10, so that the strength of this inspiring new US president’s commitment to this vision will be clear to Israeli voters before they go to the polls.
(Previously, I’d expressed some support for Naomi Chazan’s argument that for the US to try to do something to “influence” Israel’s voters on February 10 could well end up back-firing. Now, however, in light of the urgency of the Gaza crisis and its worldwide repurcussions, I think Obama really needs to try to do this. Every action or gesture he takes that can strengthen the hand of the pro-peace forces in Israel and the rest of the region is very urgently needed.)
Politics and diplomacy: These are what this war has been all about. Now let’s see the Palestinians, the Arabs, and the US all at least get their own houses in order. As for the Israelis– whose deep bellophilia has shocked much of the world over the past three weeks– let’s just hope that they have time to reflect, in the three weeks ahead, on the proposition that war, truly, is not the answer to their problems.
Their country’s war against Gaza might have made many of them “feel good” over the past three weeks. But at what cost, at what cost? Certainly, it has not made the prospects for longterm good relations with their Palestinian neighbors any easier, at all.
Ceasefire, thank God. Now to the final peace.
So now we have, finally, a ceasefire in Gaza that is reciprocal but not negotiated and not durable at all.
People and governments around the world should pay some attention to ensuring the durability of this ceasefire and also– certainly– to providing the massive relief effort that the survivors of the Gaza assault so desperately need.
But please let’s not see people getting hung up on side-issues like “how to police the Gaza tunnels.” There should be no tunnels between Gaza and Egypt, or between Gaza and anyplace else, since the tunnels were only ever a side-effect of the siege/blockade to which Gaza was subjected. Now, the emphasis must be on:
- 1. re-opening Gaza fully and safely to the outside world, and
2. moving with greatest speed and seriousness to the securing of the final peace agreement between Israel and all its Arab neighbors, including the Palestinians.
Some friends have told me this is premature, dangerous, and un-doable because the state of relations between Hamas and the Fateh/PA leadership remains so tense and/or uncertain. I think that is a very dangerous argument, since it is one that– once again!– permits a postponing of the international effort that is needed more urgently than ever before to secure the final peace.
In many episodes in the lengthy history of British de-colonization, the withdrawing (British) power and its allies actually helped to form the coalition with which Britain negotiated the withdrawal agreement. These coalitions of nationalist forces– many of which had previously been fighting against each other, quite often at the active instigation of the colonial power– came together in the course of the independence negotiation, partly in response to the positive momentum that the negotiation itself generated.
All that is needed in the broad negotiation are some basic and universally applied ground-rules such as: As many parties as possible should be included, provided they agree to a ceasefire during the course of the negotiation (though disarmament prior to talking is not a necessary requirement); All parties should be willing to prove their support by participating in a peaceful election or referendum; No topics of concern are out of bounds…
So let the negotiations for all three remaining strands (Israeli-Palestinian, Israeli-Syrian, Israeli-Lebanese) of the final peace begin! Within weeks! Let’s see the international community– including the US– commit to reaching final agreement on this comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace accord within nine months. A nice gestational period. But actually, one that is also quite doable since so much of the legwork on the details of a final peace was completed during the 1990s.
At the Annapolis summit in November 2007, President George W. Bush (remember him?) and Condi Rice promised that they would reach a final peace agreement on just the Palestinian track “within a year.” They did not succeed, for a large number of reasons. Firstly, they didn’t really try very hard. Secondly, they were never prepared to apply even-handed pressure to both “sides” in the negotiation. Thirdly, they were meanwhile working hard not just to exclude Hamas and its allies from the negotiation but also, indeed, to encircle and crush Hamas, despite the fact that it represents a considerable portion of the Palestinian public. Fourthly, they were trying to engage only the PA/Fateh in the negotiation while preventing any kind of parallel Syrian-Israeli negotiation from progressing. Fifthly, they really weren’t serious.
But another failure of the whole post-Annapolis effort was a failure of the rest of the international community. All the other, non-US powers seemed quite content to let the US continue to monopolize the (mis-)handling of this important item on the international agenda.
The “Quartet” has only ever, up until now, been a mechanism used by Washington to harness the power of others in the international community to its own goals and policy.
Now, if it continues to exist, the Quartet must become much more effectively a coordinating body for the entire international community.
Actually, why do we need a Quartet at all? Why not just let the UN Security Council run this last, sorely needed phase of the too-long-running Israeli-Arab “peace process.”
Israel, deterrence, and self-referentialism
Israeli leaders and analysts have proclaimed that one of the main goals of the ghastly, extremely inhumane war on Gaza was to “restore the credibility of Israeli deterrence”– a credibility that had, they felt, been badly damaged by the outcome of the 33-Day War against Hizbullah in 2006.
But some influential Israelis, it now turns out, have a very weird and self-referential understanding of what “deterrence” is. It turns out that their version of deterrence has much more to do with their own machismo or testosterone level than it does with the attitudes or feelings of non-Israeli others who are or might become their opponents in war.
In traditional strategic thinking, deterrence is quintessentially a phenomenon that is interactive between two parties: I succeed in deterring you from attacking me if I am able to convince you that if you should do so, the retribution I would enact on you would make you far worse off than ever; and therefore, you decide not to attack me.
It is hard to absolutely prove the existence of successful deterrence, since government decisionmakers are understandably reluctant to admit openly either that they have been deterred in the past from taking actions that they might otherwise have taken or, more importantly, that they remain susceptible to such deterrent pressure in the present and the foreseeable future. (So yes, there is an element of machismo– or more simply, face-saving– involved in that reluctance of the deterree to admit to having been or still being deterred.)
But the reciprocal deterrence between the world’s two hyper-nuclear-armed ‘superpowers’ was the central strategic fact of the Cold War. During those decades it provided a degree of strategic stability to what otherwise would likely have been a chaotic, violent, and possibly speciescidal era. And luckily, as the decades of the Cold War progressed, strategic thinkers and national leaders in both the US and the USSR became increasingly able to think about, map, and even talk with each other about the– necessarily interactive— psychological dimensions of the whole phenomenon of strategic deterrence.
But now, inside Israeli society’s extremely self-referential little bubble of a political elite, a whole new understanding of ‘deterrence’ seems to have been incubating. I first got wind of this when I was reading a report from Israel in The Economist in London yesterday, in which the as-always-anonymous Economist reporter wrote this about the Gaza war:
- In the short term, the [Israeli] government claims already to have restored its deterrent power. Favourable sentiment in the southern towns under rocket fire and among the reservists massed along the border bears this out.
Excuse me? The attitudes of Israelis being used as evidence about the restoration of Israel’s deterrent power? Um, Economist-people, deterrence has to do with affecting the attitudes of those others who are or might be your adversaries, not with affecting your own attitudes…
Well, I thought maybe it was just that reporter (or her or his editors) getting sloppy on a fast-moving story. And yes, there certainly seems to have been editorial sloppiness or at least deep ignorance involved there. But perhaps the reporter was picking up something significant in the Israeli zeitgeist within which she or he moves. Because today, in the NYT, Steven Erlanger wrote this:
- While the details are debated and the dead are counted, a critical long-term issue is whether the Gaza operation restores Israel’s deterrent. Israel wants Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and the Arab world to view it as too strong and powerful to seriously threaten or attack. That motivation is one reason, Israeli officials say, for going into Gaza so hard, using such firepower, and fighting Hamas as an enemy army.
The answer will not be known for many months, but the key to the Muslim world’s reaction is actually that of the Israeli public, said Yossi Klein Halevi, of the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies in Jerusalem. “The Arabs take their cue from Israeli responses,” he said. “Deterrence is about how Israelis feel, whether they feel they’ve won or lost.”
Mr. Halevi cited the 1973 war — which Egyptians celebrate and Israelis mourn, though it ended with a spectacular Israel counterattack — and the 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, apologized for the 2006 war on television, “but he quickly reversed himself to declare a wonderful victory when he saw the Israeli public declaring defeat,” Mr. Halevi said.
This quote is so revealing! According to Halevi, Arabs have little agency or cognitive capability of their own, but are completely reliant on “getting their cues” from Israel… So if they see Israelis feeling downhearted and defeated, Arabs will feel strong and undeterred, whereas if they see Israelis feeling strong and self-confident they will be fearful and deterred…
It is all about Israel! It is all about Israelis being able to feel machismo, strutting their stuff as they watch the smoldering ruins of Gaza schools and mosques and watch sad Gaza families counting their dead and tending their wounded.
I shan’t even dwell on the moral sickness of such attitudes. I’ll just point out that if Israelis really do believe that their deterrent capability is only a matter of how they themselves feel about the world, then they are are being sorely mislead.
This business about Nasrullah “apologizing for the 2006 war” that Halevi raises is another non-trivial canard that has drifted into the Israeli discourse in recent months.
First off, it’s important to note that Nasrullah was not for a moment apologizing to the Israelis for Hizbullah’s actions during the war as a whole. He was apologizing to the Lebanese people for the error of tactical judgment he made when, as he said, he and his advisers had not expected that their cross-border POW-capture operation of July 12, 2006 would spark such a truly disproportionate and damaging Israeli response. But at a broader operational/strategic level, Hizbullah proved itself quite able to respond to and withstand the Israeli blitzkrieg unleashed on July 12 and emerged with its core strategic goal of preserving the organizational integrity, independence, and counter-strike capability of the Hizbullah movement well realized.
As I wrote here shortly after that war, the war had been about two things: firstly, the desire of each side to “restore” the credibility of the deterrent it projected toward the other side, and secondly, the desire of the Israeli (Olmert) government to win a significant change in Hizbullah’s political and organizational standing inside Lebanon. In the first of those contests, both sides won— in that each was in fact able to reassert the credibility of the deterrent it projected toward the other. But in the second contest, Israel failed, since it had had the ‘transformational’ political goal in Lebanon, which it failed to realize.
The underlying durability of the mutual even though highly asymmetrical form of deterrence that was re-established between Israel and Hizbullah in 2006 is the explanation why the Israel-Lebanon front never heated up during this latest Gaza war. Both sides were presumably active and attentive, to make sure it didn’t. Both sides had something of value to lose in the event that it had opened up. The mutual deterrence relationship held.
So what, now, of Gaza?
Do Israelis feel jubilant and invulnerable? Maybe so.
But is that good for peace?
Do Gazans feel extremely sad and to some extent “defeated”? I am sure they feel very, very sad. But I doubt if they feel “defeated” in the way Halevi and many other Israelis would like them to feel. There is, after all, very little evidence that any of the following has happened:
- 1. The Hamas leadership has been destroyed.
2. The Hamas leadership has surrendered.
3. Hamas’s rocketing capabilities– primitive though they are– or its capacity to build more rockets, have been destroyed.
4. Gazans and other Palestinians have started to turn against Hamas
The latest news is that Hamas has announced that it will observe a one-week cessation in hostilities, in response to Israel’s announcement yesterday of a unilateral ceasefire, and with the expectation from the Hamas side that during this coming week all the IDF troops who reinvaded Gaza during the past three weeks will withdraw.
The situation on the ground has improved somewhat today after Israel and Hamas started holding their fire, and after at least some of the IDF troops in Gaza started withdrawing.
But the Gaza situation remains very tenuous indeed. The ceasefire has been essentially un-negotiated, and as I blogged yesterday important elements of it have yet to be agreed.
Today Condi Rice, most of whose previous actions regarding this war have been extremely unhelpful, finally made a statement that looks fairly constructive.
Here’s the report of what she said,
- “The goal remains a durable and fully respected ceasefire that will lead to stabilization and normalization in Gaza,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said after Israel called off its three-week offensive in the area.
“The United States commends Egypt for its [mediating] efforts and remains deeply concerned by the suffering of innocent Palestinians,” she added. “We welcome calls for immediate coordinated international action to increase assistance flows and will contribute to such efforts.”
So now, let’s hope the ceasefire does get made a lot more durable over the days ahead– and that this can help pave the way not just to the “normalization” of the situation in Gaza but to the speedy securing of a final-status peace Israel and all its Arab neighbors.
One Virtuous Man
Tomorrow is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.
In the late 1960’s a fellow officer of mine, an African-American, call him Captain Em, was quite upset that Dr. King had come out against the Vietnam War. King, Captain Em stated to me, was fully justified in seeking better civil rights but he had no business commenting upon the foreign policy of the United States, particularly the righteous campaign in Vietnam (which was to result in the deaths of 58,000 US troops, average age of 19, and millions of Vietnamese). I disagreed with Captain Em, but at the time I wasn’t sure why. Now I know better.
What are the responsibilities of citizenship, after all?
Henry David Thoreau, at a time when the US was invading Mexico, wrote about the functions of good citizenship in his essay on Civil Disobedience.
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What is the price-current of an honest man and patriot to-day? They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes the petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret. At most, they give only a cheap vote, and a feeble countenance and God-speed, to the right, as it goes by them. There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man.
Dr. King, like Tolstoy and Gandhi, was familiar with Thoreau’s work, and also was particularly influenced by “Civil Disobedience.” So when King decided in 1967 to oppose the Vietnam War he was prepared for the enmity that naturally came from his regular supporters such as Captain Em. Thoreau had warned him:
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And very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.
Dr. King delivered his little-known speech “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City.
Link Gaza ceasefire details to final peace push
The need for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza becomes more urgent every day. However, even after the guns and rockets– and Israel’s warplanes, naval guns, and precision-guided missiles– all fall silent, there will remain numerous very important details of the ceasefire agreement to be worked out.
These “modalities” constitute the difference between a “raw” ceasefire (the guns fall silent, but there is little assurance this will last) and a more robust ceasefire agreement. The modalities include items like:
- 1. The precise plan for the withdrawal of the IDF troops currently on the ground in Gaza;
2. The access agreements between Gaza and the outside world– including both immediate access for urgent humanitarian relief and longer-term access for the rebuilding, reconstruction and hopefully also economic development programs in Gaza;
3. The need for arms control provisions;
4. Monitoring mechanisms for the ceasefire and for the above three agreements that are credible, inclusive, effective, and therefore robust;
5. Other items like the release of detainees related to the current fighting.
These are not easy items to reach agreement on quickly, even though Israel and Hamas have previously built up some level of trust and understanding around the June 2008 ceasefire. Negotiating these modalities must not stand in the way of concluding a speedy ceasefire. But we need to understand that one of the major reasons both sides continue to fight is because each wants to win the optimal terms regarding these modalities. (Another is that neither side wants to ‘back down’ first.)
However, looking at the above list of the ceasefire-related modalities that need to negotiated, it is clear that they provide a key segue between what needs to be done for this ceasefire and some of the continuing items on the final-peace agenda.
Besides, if a final peace agreement between Israel and all of its Arab neighbors is not secured well before the end of this year, then we can expect further extremely damaging crises in Gaza or elsewhere in the region at any time over the coming years.
The momentum of this crisis needs to be seized and exploited for a comprehensive final peace effort.
I was encouraged by the statements Obama made a number of times this week to the effect that he intends to start working for an inclusive final peace agreement “from Day One.”
Day One is now three days away. Even if there’s a “raw” ceasefire in Gaza before then, the modalities to make the ceasefire more robust will remain to be worked out. Obama should start spelling out the urgency– and the huge benefits– of a comprehensive final peace. From Day One.
(Note: Sorry that I earlier published two versions of this same post under different headlines. The vagaries of trying to blog while traveling… ~HC)
Tewks: “Let the Children Dance”
I recently highlighted Gina Bennett’s National Security Mom, with it’s marvelous drawing from the “lessons we teach our children” to understand national security.
I’ve been wondering then what lessons Israel has been purporting to teach to the children of Gaza. Is this the message of the iron fist, that if you dare to mess with Israel, you will be pounded, mercilessly, until you submit? That seems to be logic of Tom Friedman’s latest column, wherein he invokes the “success” of Israel’s pounding of Lebanon in 2006 to explain Israel’s Gaza “strategy:”
“Israel basically said that when dealing with a nonstate actor, Hezbollah, nested among civilians, the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians — the families and employers of the militants — to restrain Hezbollah in the future….That was the education of Hezbollah.”
In Gaza, Friedman can’t quite tell “if Israel is trying to eradicate Hamas or trying to “educate” Hamas, by inflicting a heavy death toll on Hamas militants and heavy pain on the Gaza population.”
Friedman favors “educating” those civilians who would vote for Hamas. He prefers that Israel not “obliterate” them. How magnanimous.
We’re now past 1,000 Gazans dead, including over 300 children. With Gazans now properly “educated,” Friedman deems the time for “diplomacy” with them is at hand
But what lessons have the surviving children learned? Are they now more likely to submit to Israel’s will or turn in despair to very violent means?
As I have struggled with such madness, I came across a lyric from a rising Charlottesville singer/thinker, David Tewks: I post his blog preface and song with his permission.
Just Do It, George
I know everyone was glued to her or his TV screen watching George Bush’s farewell address, and if you were then you were no doubt struck by a line in his speech that was stolen from Jimmy Carter’s farewell address 28 years ago. (h/t Heather Hurlburt)
George Bush’s 2009 farewell address:
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“And I will always be honored to carry a title that means more to me than any other: citizen of the United States of America.”
Jimmy Carter’s 1981 farewell address:
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“In a few days, I will lay down my official responsibilities in this office — to take up once more the only title in our democracy superior to that of president, the title of citizen.”
Now George Bush can function as a citizen! Think about it. And there are things that George (like Jimmy) wants to do.
In March 2008, after U.S. President George W. Bush got an earful about problems and progress in Afghanistan, he said:
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“I must say, I’m a little envious. If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed. It must be exciting for you … in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger.”
Well, we’ve got some jobs lined up for George now that he’s leaving office where it will be romantic, you know, confronting danger. Afghanistan! Yes, that storied land of the Hindu Kush and the Khyber Pass can now be a reality for Georgie.
Heck, he’s only 62 years old and with all that mountain-biking I’m sure that even a dummy like him he can handle the easy jobs we’ve found for him.
Gaza Update
What are the US ‘papers of record’ up to?
The Washington Post has offered balanced coverage:
Israelis Push to Edge of Gaza City
Move Could Signal A Long Urban Battle
But this WaPo essay is ridiculous–
Gaza’s True ‘Disproportion’
Carlos Alberto Montaner
Israelis are being accused of suffering too few casualties in their confrontation with the Hamas terrorists. Those who reason thus usually speak the words “disproportion” or “asymmetry” in an indignant tone. While at this writing close to a thousand Arab Palestinians have died or been wounded as a result of the bombings, the Israeli losses amount to just over a dozen. . .Tel Aviv’s critics — from whom an anti-Semitic stench often rises — do not say whether Israel should increase its quota of cadavers or if it must reduce the Arabs’ quota to achieve the reasonable proportion of blood that will soothe the peculiar itch for parity that afflicts them. . . .This demand for “proportionality” can only be called surprising. . .Israel has not the slightest interest in causing casualties.
The New York Times:
Israelis United on War as Censure Rises Abroad
JERUSALEM — To Israel’s critics abroad, the picture could not be clearer: Israel’s war in Gaza is a wildly disproportionate response to the rockets of Hamas, causing untold human suffering and bombing an already isolated and impoverished population into the Stone Age, and it must be stopped. Yet here in Israel very few, at least among the Jewish population, see it that way.
And this Op-Ed NY Times piece by Rashid Khalidi is good.
What You Don’t Know About Gaza
NEARLY everything you’ve been led to believe about Gaza is wrong. Below are a few essential points that seem to be missing from the conversation, much of which has taken place in the press, about Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip.
Get Afghanistan Right
This is “Get Afghanistan Right Week” and here is some information to look at:
We Can’t Afford to Sink Deeper into the Afghan Quagmire
Let’s be clear: the war in Afghanistan is not “the good war.” It is not “the right war,” as President-elect Obama has called it. Nor is it really Bush’s war, considering how many Congressional representatives (Democrats included) initially supported it and continue to favor the Obama administration’s calls for escalation. And yet it’s not quite Obama’s war either — though it could be soon. Right now it’s just our country’s war, and as such we need to be able to discuss it frankly and freely — with open discourse that was absent in the run up to both this war and the one in Iraq.
Taking Down Pro-Escalation Arguments
In this month’s issue of Foreign Policy, Nathaniel Fick and John Nagl lay out a detailed pro-escalation argument. Alex Thurston takes them apart.
Obama’s Got One Thing Right About the Mess In Afghanistan– It’s Inexorably Connected To The Mess In Pakistan
Five Suggestions for Diplomatic Progress in South Asia
It’s not fair to criticize escalation in Afghanistan without offering alternatives, so here are the five things to do instead of escalating.
More good stuff here.
And my previous article Operation Enduring Failure
What do you think?