'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Catching up with Nir Rosen

I'm a bit behind with my reading. I just want to bookmark this piece by Nir Rosen, written in October I think. He was embedded with an Armored Cavalry Regiment in western Iraq.

The piece is titled "The wrong Ayoub". It uses the description of a unit forcefully breaking into a guy's house, wounding him, and arresting him-- only later to discover he was the "wrong" Ayoub-- to illustrate the atrociously poor level of intelligence the unit was relying on.

This part, at the very beginning, is also very troubling:

According to a major from the Judge Advocate General's office working on establishing an Iraqi judicial process, at least 7,000 Iraqis are being detained by US forces. Many languish in prisons indefinitely, lost in a system that imposes English-language procedures on Arabic speakers with Arabic names not easily transcribed.

Some are termed "security detainees" and held for six months pending a review to determine whether they are still a "security risk". Most are innocent. Many were arrested simply because a neighbor did not like them. A lieutenant-colonel familiar with the process adds that there is no judicial process for the thousands of detainees. If the military were to try them, that would entail a court martial, which would imply that the United States is occupying Iraq, and lawyers working for the administration are still debating whether it is an occupation or a liberation.

To Iran!

So! We're off early tomorrow. We got our visas yesterday, and our tickets today. We have tickets to Teheran for tomorrow and shall then somehow find a flight to Mashhad where our conference ("Islam and Democracy") starts on Wednesday morning. The whole trip will be incredibly rushed-- we might have to leave Mashhad on Thurs. evening to catch our flight back here, Friday... Oh well, it should be interesting.

I haven't been to Iran since the 1978-79 revolution. A whole generation has grown up there since then...

Btw, I was just surfing the BBC website. They have a new, experimental, "hosted" blog-type thing there, with contributors from Iraq. It went up on their site today and will run in the first instance for two weeks.

So far, the contributors (all of whom have been invited to contribute by the Beeb, I think) include five Iraqis, one British contractor and one US army lieutenant.

It struck me as a little stilted. Certainly it lacks the intimacy, verve, and passion of Faiza's blog, and those run by her sons, etc. The US army guy, Bryan Suites, comes across as incredibly Chief Wiggles-y, and the British contractor tells us only that he works, "for an international company in the International or Green Zone in Baghdad." So what is his business, exaactly? The Iraqi contributors all tell us what they do. Even Suites does. But not "Stuart Ritchie". Whoever he is.

A quick glance at what's up there so far revealed a few interesting descriptions of things. But I think I'll stick with the real blogs by Iraqis that I've been reading up till now.

Zeyad, over at Healing Iraq, had an interesting post up on November 20. (Actually, it's the most recent one he has up there, as of now.) He was describing, in very vivid and factual terms, how the rash of attacks that plagued Baghdad around then felt to him and his family.

At the end, he noted:

One can't help but notice that the clerics who usually incite holy wars in Iraq against the US occupation on the expense of Iraqis are based in countries allied to the US such as Qatar, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. On the other hand, you have Sheikh Salah Al-Din Kuftaro, son of Sheikh Ahmed Kuftaro, the late Grand Mufti of Syria, publicly denouncing the behaviour of Iraqi insurgents yesterday during Friday prayers at the Kuftaro mosque in Damascus. He described them as the "present day Kharijites" and their actions as "unislamic".

That's a really interesting observation.

Kuftaro was the Sheikh we went to visit in Damascus last week, as described in the second half of this JWN post.

Fallujah war crimes evidence

The Boston Globe's Anne Barnard was embedded with a task force from the Army's 1st Infantry Division throughout much of the battle of Fallujah. She had an account of her experiences in yesterday's paper that provides excellent, firsthand evidence of the issuing of commands that seem clearly to contravene the Geneva Conventions, especially in regard to the use of grossly disproportionate violence inside the city.

I note that UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Canada's Louise Arbour, has already expressed her concern about the level of violence used by the US in Fallujah. I can't remember if she also said she'd like some form of action to be taken on this? Frankly, I don't know what form such action might take. The US is, as we know, not a signatory of the ICC. The only other forms of legal-type action that could be taken would be a case brought by another state in the ICJ (but which state would do it? "Iraq"?? Ha-ha-ha) -- or, a prosecution from within the US military for contraventions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which is supposed to include all the provisions of the Geneva Conventions.

I guess political action inside the US is the only thing, at this point, that can rein these guys in.

Anyway, I'll just quickly take from Barnard's excellent account the four clearest points--most of them taken from before-action briefings that she attended-- where I see the laws of war apparently being contravened:

(1) To avoid booby traps and ambushes, battalion leaders told the men to fire at houses and buildings before entering them. That made for a trail of destruction. There was no way to know for sure if they were hurting noncombatants, even in a city where most residents had fled.

[Commanders are under an obligation to take positive steps to avoid inflicting harm on noncombatants. Such steps studiously avoided here. ~HC]

(2) ''The first time you get shot at from a building, it's rubble," [Capt. Paul]Fowler told his platoon leaders. ''No questions asked."

(3) Suspected enemy buildings were to be ''cleared by fire" before troops entered. ''No boots on the ground unless you're looking for body parts," Fowler said.

(4) Guerrillas kept attacking the Iraqi troops as they tried to hold the hospital. A row of houses nearby was nearly demolished. ''We're just cleaning up the trash," Fowler said.
[Two possible serious violations here... One was that the --pro-US-- "Iraqi troops" had taken over the hospital and were apparently trying to use it as a military position: a clear violation, there. The other, the demolition of the whol row of houses... ]

Her account also provides some glimpses into the sense that some of these US fighting men had, that their actions were serious, and terrible-- and perhaps even either unproductive or politically quite counter-productive.

For example, when she writes:

The battle of Fallujah this month pitted the world's most powerful military force against fighters in tennis shoes wielding homemade rocket launchers. Military planners had decided to use the blunt instrument of heavy armor against an insurgency that they acknowledge cannot be defeated by force alone -- betting that the blow to the guerrillas would outweigh the resentment stirred by the attack. So the job fell to the soldiers from Task Force 2-2, who were accompanied by a Globe reporter.

Afterward, even as they took pride in their speed and sheer destructive power, grunts and officers alike reflected that their handiwork could cause a backlash -- and that the battle has yet to be won in the hearts of Fallujah's people.

''I think it's going to get hotter for a while, when people come back and see what we did," said Specialist Todd Taylor, 21.

US commanders gave the unit a contradictory task: Take back the city with minimal US casualties, but leave it as intact as possible. The latter proved difficult...

Or this:

The battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Newell, said US forces could never apply a ''Fallujah method" to other insurgent hubs in Iraq, such as Mosul and Baqubah, where civilian life continues more normally amid rebel activity.

''This is the first time since World War II that someone has turned an American armored task force loose in a city with no restrictions," Newell said. ''Let's hope we don't see it again any time soon."

That point about "not being able" to apply a Fallujah method to other Iraqi cities is interesting. Firstly, I'm not sure that it's true. If the US hawks decided they "needed" to apply it to, say, Mosul or Latifiyyeh, what's to stop them?? All that it would take, I guess, would be a systematic campaign of some weeks prior to the assault, during which the US/Allawist decisionmakers would:

(1) Build up a huge campaign against the "nest of insurgents" inside the next-targeted city... perhaps with the added frisson that "Abu Musaeb al-Zarqawi" was said to be hiding out there, and...

(2) Use every means possible to get as many of the city's civilian residents as possible to leave it. (Though mind you, once Fallujah's civilians start telling people what happened to the homes and properties that they left behind them, I'm not so sure that next time round, people will be so ready to leave.)

Additionally, if the US military is not, actually, planning to undertake any more "Fallujahs" inside Iraq, then the deterrent effect they evidently hoped to achieve by doing it there becomes a lot less credible...

Barnard ends with this:

Restless in the back of a Bradley, Sergeant John Cunningham, 37, of Boston, said it was ridiculous to label any particular war tactic inhumane.

''People shooting each other is inhumane. Let's find a better way to solve our problems," he said.

Then he added: ''Let's get this over with. The way home leads through Fallujah."

That's an interesting set of comments. At one level he's quite right that "'People shooting each other is inhumane", and that the fighting should end, with the US troops getting home as soon as possible.

But the idea that "The way home leads through Fallujah"? And that there is some kind of moral equivalency between Cunningham's massively destructive army going half way araound the world to impose its will on the citizens of another nation, and the pathetic, man-with-a-single RPG level of resistance that they encountered in Fallujah? I don't think so.

Anyway, we should now add Anne Barnard to Kevin Sites as examples of embedded journalists who have valuable information, some of which they are willing to share, about the laws-of-war contraventions they saw being practised by the forces they accompanied. I hope that people in the human-rights movement are contacting these and all other embedded journalists in order to have them make on-the-record statements that are as full and detailed as possible about all such contraventions.

[Note: I got his link, as many of the others I've been using recently, from the Comments threads in Yankeedoodle's great blog Today in Iraq. Yankee himself, who has kept his great compilation blog running for 18 months now, is having a bit of a burnout. But his commenters are still doing great. Tyhanks, all of you.]

Palestinian elections-2

Marwan Barghouthi as the Palestinians' Mandela? It has always been a possibility. And it is one that, despite the Fateh Revolutionary Council's recent decision to back Abu Mazen as the movement's candidate in the upcoming PA elections, is still being actively considered by many in the upper echelons of Fateh.

I imagine that in the first instance that would be "Mandela, the representative of all the nationalist prisoners, whose release becomes an international cause célèbre", rather than "Mandela, the wily political prisoner who manages to negotiate a far-reaching political deal with his captors, while always keeping within the discipline of his movement"... Though that other step may come later, God willing.

Except for this: remember just how many years Mandela had to be in jail (28), before he reached his deal with De Klerk... By that standard, it would be another 23 years or so till the Palestinians and Israelis reached their deal. A depressing thought, altogether.

Anyway, this prospect of Fateh launching a broad campaign to focus on "Free Barghouthi", echoing the "Free Mandela" movement in which so many of us participated back in the 1970s and 1980s, is just one of the things I learned about by reading this article, from Saida Hamad in East Jerusalem, in the online version of Hayat today. I even, as an exercize in my Arabic-language reading skills, wrote out a complete translation of the piece in English...

(Why is this happening? We were planning to be on our way to Teheran today. But the Iranian visas didn't come through until just after the departure of the flight we were supposed to be leaving Beirut on. There's a possibility we can get another flight, Tuesday. Meantime, I don't want to be sitting here in our apartment in Beirut twiddling my thumbs...)

So anyway, the four most interesting things in Hamad's piece were these:

1. The info about the possible "Free Barghouthi" campaign. As you can see from the translation I provided, the "old guard" guys in Fateh reportedly promised this to Marwan as part of the quid pro quo they offered him in return for him agreeing not only not stand against Abu Mazen in the January elections, but also (gulp), actually to support him... The other parts of the quid pro quo were: (a ) A commitment to hold the 16th meeting of Fateh's policymaking General Conference no later than August, so that both the Central Committee and (I assume) the Revolutionary Council can be renewed there through democratic means... (In contrast to much past practice.) Plus (b) the possibility that in connection with the "Free Barghouthi" campaign, Abu Mazen would name Marwan as his "Vice Presidential" candidate in the PA election...So far, it looks as though Marwan drove a pretty hard bargain...

1. Continuing evidence of the internal decay inside Fateh. This, from the reporting that the first thing Abu Mazen needed to do after getting "nomionated" by Fateh was actually to try to win the wholehearted support of Fateh's people themselves for his candidacy. Having Marwan on the ticket as a "Vice Presidential" might well help his chances. I have to say I have no knowledge of the PA structure allowing for a "Vice President" at all. So it will be interesting indeed to see whether the Israelis and Americans will allow the PA to print up ballots with space for that...
2. Some info about Hamas's position. Hamad says Hamas will come out with its "final position" on the elections sometime in the coming week, and it could be anything "from a boycott to supporting an independent candidate." She also mentioned the possibility that they might "not oppose" Abu Mazen, in return for a promise that he'd hold general (i.e., I think, parliamentary) elections before May 15th. That latter idea-- of Hamas insisting on the holding of both parliamentary and municipal elections within a strict timetable-- has been mentioned before. I note that in pursuing this strategy of focusing on and participating in parliamentary and municipal elections while abstaining from participation in national-leadership elections, Hamas would be acting in line with the practice followed by Hizbullah here in Lebanon to great effect. For Hizbullah, it has really allowed them to consolidate their political base, act as a powerful political force in society, and improve the quality of governance at several levels-- while avoiding the need to participate in the very "messy" compromises involved in exercizing national leadership.
3. That Mustafa Barghouthi, cousin of Marwan and one of the leaders of the very effective "Medical Relief Committees" in the West Bank, will on Monday be announcing his candidacy as the nominee of the leftist coalition the "Palestinian National Initiative". He will be doing this during a 3-way videoconference in which while he participates from Ramallah, Dr. Haidar Abdel-Shafei will participate from Gaza and Ibrahim Dakkak, a distinguished engineer and city planner, will participate from occupied Jerusalem./ What a great idea! I hope the event works out well for them.

Maybe just sitting here and doing some close translation work is good for me. I don't know. I'd rather be in Teheran, but I suspect we might not get there.

Testimonies from Fallujah

Terrible, searing testimonies now coming out from inside Fallujah. If you can only read one, I suggest this one from a Russian (or, Turko-Russian?) doctor who'd been working in one of the city's hospitals. (Not clear which.)

Look especially at the references he makes to the results of the extreme water shortage inside the city:

Together with Americans the flies invaded the city. They are millions. The whole city seems to be under their power. The flies cover the corpses. The older is corpse, the more flies are upon it. First they cover a corpse as by some strange rash. Then they begin to swarm upon it, and then a gray moving shroud covers the corpse. Flies swarm upon some ruins as gray monstrous shadows. The stench is awful.

The flies are everywhere. In the hospital wards, operating rooms, canteen. You find them even where they cannot be. In the "humanitarian" plastic bottle with warm plastic-stinking water. The bottle is almost full, simply someone opened it for a second and made a gulp, but this black spot is already floating there...

It is a general crisis with water. There are simply no clean sources. The local residents fetch water from the river, muddy, gray and dead. You can buy anything for water now. The sewage system is broken, the water supply is broken, and electricity is absent in the city.

I am afraid to imagine what will happen in two weeks. Hepatitis will take toll of thousands. They say already that people at the outskirts are in fever with the symptoms of typhus. But one cannot verify it. They prohibited moving in the city...

On the second day they simply started to demolish the city. Close explosions rocked the floor rocked under the feet. The plaster fell off the ceiling, the windowpanes burst. You could talk only by shouting because of the continuous gunfire. But the most terrible has begun already on the first day. The wounded started to come into the hospital like a flow. One of the doctors tuned in to BBC by his pocket radio. The news announcer mumbled something about the precision weapons and high professional level of soldiers, about collateral damage reduced to minimum.

I do not know in which place they employed their precision weapons, we had an endless stream of wounded children, women, and elders. Not dozens - hundreds! On the third day the medicines started to come to the end. Especially anesthetics and antibiotics. But the stream did not exhausted.

...

Observing Americans, I catch myself thinking that they are incredibly similar to Russian soldiers, whom I saw in Grozny in January 1994. The same infinite weariness, "burnt out" eyes. The same dull expression on the faces, when the conscience is tired to react to outer stimuli. The same repulsion from the outer world, "autism". In the whole world they have now only them and the rest is wicked and evil.... Yes, to storm the cities is a nasty business. As Stalingrad, as Grozny, as Fallujah.

...

Yesterday Dr. Ahmed brought half a liter of iodine from somewhere in the bottle of Chivas Regal. He put is to the refrigerator, defrosted long ago. One of GIs opens the refrigerator, sees the bottle. Looking around his shoulder, he takes it out quickly. Apparently noticing that it is open, he turns away the cap and smells the liquid. After that he winced and, with already familiar 'fuck', throws it to the wall. The iodine splashes the treatment room by red shower. It smells by the sea and alcohol. GI goes away without a word. We do no speak, too. This iodine was the last one.

...

In the evening we receive the wounded teenager. He has two bullet wounds in his chest. By him is a woman - his mother and an old man. They shout, explaining something. I hear familiar "min faldik!" - please! - "Aunni!" - help!.. The teenager is taken to the operating room. He has no chances - we are practically without the medicines. And even if the operation will be successful, there will be nothing to carry out [post operational treatment]. Abdul Karim gloomily opens the pack of cigarettes. He just finished listening to the long confused explanations by the old man.

-- After interrogations, the Americans give the usual detainees to our traitors ... ? he calls the new Iraqi army by this word ? and those shoot them. This boy was executed together with three other men. Bastards...

The rumors about the shootings without trial become true. Many wounded tell that somebody was executed or finished off before their eyes. After all I saw these days I begin to believe it. The American army evidently has broken loose...

The surgeon comes out after an hour. The teenager has died. The crying mother is led away by the old Iraqi. He is her brother. The surgeon sits down on the sofa and closes his eyes.

-- Aneh teben! ? I am so tired! ...

During the five days, while the count was yet conducted, more than three thousand wounded passed through our hospital. These were the people who lived nearby. The people who could be delivered to us. Nobody knows how many people in the city are dead. Nobody will ever know...

...

And here I am going through the city and cannot say a word in shock. I cannot recognize the city. Only ten days ago it was an Iraqi town with its regular for centuries Arabic life. Boling bazaars, noisy streets. And here I am going through the empty dead city, between the ugly "pyramids" of destroyed buildings, broken streets, whole quarters wiped from the face of earth. The city is killed and dismembered by some monstrous maniac. Beelzebub - the lord of the flies. Under the flag of stars and stripes, where the stars look so alike to thick flesh flies.

I go and ask the skies again, like five years ago in bombed out Kosovo, will anybody ever answer for this barbarism? But the skies do not respond. Only a few US battle helicopters pass nearby my road towards the ruins of the city. The killings continue.

I also read the account by BBC correspondent Fadhil Badrani, whose earlier phoned-in interviews gave some glimpses into the terror being experienced by people inside the city.

That's right: terror.

In the account he gave Wednesday of his exit from the city, I found the little part at the end about the destruction of his study/ library/ office space particularly poignant:

My old house, near the train station, is half destroyed. I had built an office to one side of it, which had a library with all my books, documents, professional certificates and newspapers.

All this is gone. It got bombed.

I imagined if this had happened to me. How can a person reconstitute himself as a writer having lost so many vital professional materials? Will the BBC still want to employ him if he has no access to these things?

The Nation's website has a well-done piece about the effect of the fighting on Fallujah's medical facilities that also remarks on the effects of the earlier water cutoff:

The Iraqi Red Crescent Society has called the health conditions in and around Falluja "catastrophic." One hospital staff member who recently left the city reports that there were severe outbreaks of diarrheal infections among the population, with children and the elderly dying from infectious disease, starvation and dehydration in greater numbers each day. Dr. [Sami] al-Jumaili, Dr. [Eyman] al-Ani and journalist [Fadhil] Badrani each stated that the wounded and children are dying because of lack of medical attention and water. In one case, according to Dr. al-Jumaili, three children died of dehydration when their father was unable to find water for them. The US forces cut off the city's water supply before launching their assault.

"The people are dying because they are injured, have nothing to eat or drink, almost no healthcare," said Dr. al-Ani. "The small rations of food and water handed out by the US soldiers cannot provide for the population." For the thousands living in makeshift camps outside the city, according to Firdus al-Ubadi of the Red Crescent Society, hygiene and health conditions are as precarious as in Falluja. There are no oral rehydration solutions or salts for those who are dehydrated, she says.

Also shocking: the detailed description in this piece of the bombing of the city's Central Health Center:

Although the US military has dismissed accounts of the health center bombing as "unsubstantiated," in fact they are credible and come from multiple sources. Dr. Sami al-Jumaili described how US warplanes bombed the Central Health Centre in which he was working at 5:30 am on November 9. The clinic had been treating many of the city's sick and wounded after US forces took over the main hospital at the start of the invasion. According to Dr. al-Jumaili, US warplanes dropped three bombs on the clinic, where approximately sixty patients--many of whom had serious injuries from US aerial bombings and attacks--were being treated.

Dr. al-Jumaili reports that thirty-five patients were killed in the airstrike, including two girls and three boys under the age of 10. In addition, he said, fifteen medics, four nurses and five health support staff were killed, among them health aides Sami Omar and Omar Mahmoud, nurses Ali Amini and Omar Ahmed, and physicians Muhammad Abbas, Hamid Rabia, Saluan al-Kubaissy and Mustafa Sheriff.

Although the deaths of these individual health workers could not be independently confirmed, Dr. al-Jumaili's account is echoed by Fadhil Badrani, an Iraqi reporter for Reuters and the BBC. Reached by phone in Falluja, Badrani estimated that forty patients and fifteen health workers had been killed in the bombing. Dr. Eiman al-Ani of Falluja General Hospital, who said he reached the site shortly after the attack, said that the entire health center had collapsed on the patients.

As this article, by Miles Schuman notes:

These reports demand an immediate international response, an end to assaults on Falluja's civilian population and the free passage of medical aid, food and water. Louise Arbour, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, has vowed to investigate "violations of the rules of war designed to protect civilians and combatants" in Falluja and to bring the perpetrators to justice... The bombing of hospitalized patients, forced starvation and dehydration, denial of medicines and health services to the sick and wounded must be recognized for what they are: war crimes and crimes against humanity.

(Thanks to commenter Christiane for sending that link.)

I note that the Iraqi Red Crescent was finally able, Thursday, to start delivering some urgently-needed aid inside Fallujah:

"Bodies can be seen everywhere and people were crying when receiving the food parcels. It is very sad, it is a human disaster," Muhammad al-Nuri, a spokesman for the IRCS, told IRIN in Baghdad.

Al-Nuri added that according to their information, they believe there could be more than 6,000 dead in Fallujah and that it is difficult to move around inside the city due to dead bodies in the streets.

...The IRCS spokesman said they were still in need of urgent supplies, especially now they can offer assistance to the people of Fallujah.

Blankets and tents were needed along with cooking stoves, heaters and food parcels. Al-Nuri said that most of their supplies had been distributed to the people that fled Fallujah and were staying outside the town.

On Friday morning another convoy left Baghdad, with the head of the IRCS leading the delivery. "There are no houses left in Fallujah, only destroyed places. I really don't know how the people will return to the city. No one will find their homes," Dr Said Ismael Haki, the IRCS president told IRIN, following the delivery.

The International Committee of Red Cross (ICRC) spokesman in Baghdad, Ahmed Rawi, told IRIN that as soon as the IRCS delivered aid to the city, it opened the doors for other organisations to help those in need in the city and that they would leave Baghdad with another convoy on Friday carrying food parcels, heaters and medical supplies.

The IRCS also raised concerns for some 50,000 families camped around Fallujah in tents with the onslaught of winter. "We won the first step in entering Fallujah. We will now work day and night to offer the people from the city food and shelter, but we need help from other organisations too. They should be allowed to enter the city," al-Nuri added.

Stalingrad... Grozny... Fallujah.

Families in pain

Be sure you're sitting down before you click on this link, which shows scenes from funerals of some of the US military personnel killed in Iraq during October and November.

The site where I found the pics, cryptome.org, also carries an invitation to kill George Bush, from which I completely disassociate myself. However, I think they've done a great service by compiling and presenting a number of collections of very moving photos (mainly AP photos) of the funerals of those killed in action. The link I give is to the latest of those pages.

I cried when I scrolled slowly through this collection.

Then I also thought of the even greater number of Iraqis killed in the present war, and the extremely degrading situations in which the mortal remains of many of them have been left... I also thought of the extreme anguish suffered by Iraqi family members who do not know if their loved ones are dead or alive, and can only imagine the torment of, for example, a wounded family member left to rot and to dehydrate in some bombed-out house inside Fallujah.

Is it better to know or not to know "the whole truth" about the fate of a threatened loved one?

Is it better to launch a war in the face of a presumed threat, or to seek to have one's concerns addressed through methods other than war and violence?

How can we inform US voters better than before about the true human costs of war?

Why hasn't President Bush gone to a single one of these funerals?

No answers here. Only questions.

U.S. Quaker activism against war

The Friends Committee on National Legislation is a public interest lobby founded by American members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), that for more than 60 years has sought to "[connect] historic Quaker testimonies on peace, equality, simplicity and truth with peace and social justice issues which the United States government is or should be addressing."

On November 14, FCNL's governing committee adopted two important documents. The first sets out the "Legislatve Priorities " on which FCNL will focus during the term of the upcoming (109th) U.S. Congress. The second is a Minute on Moral Values. You can find both texts here.

The Legislative Priorities build directly on the historical testimonies of Quakers-- against war, and for a radical commitment to human equality and human wellbeing. So here, after all the deliberation that the FCNL decisionmakers engaged in, are the five top priorities that they identify:

* Remove all U.S. military forces and bases from Iraq, and fulfill U.S. moral and legal obligations to reconstruct Iraq through appropriate multinational, national, and Iraqi agencies.

* Promote a framework for national and international security that includes peaceful prevention and resolution of deadly conflicts, active pursuit of arms control and disarmament, adherence to international law, support for the United Nations, and participation in multilateral efforts to address the root causes of war and of terrorism.

* Restore and assure full civil liberties for all persons in the United States or under its jurisdiction, and promote human rights around the world through international institutions and treaties.

* Change federal budget, tax, and fiscal policies to reduce military spending, meet pressing human needs, and address structural economic violence.

* Promote long-term protection of the environment and eliminate a critical cause of violent conflict by reducing oil consumption and accelerating development and use of renewable energy sources.

I am so happy and energized by the clarity of this listing! Quakers may be small in number, but throughout the 350-year-long life of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), they-- we-- have often played a crucial catalytic role in bringing about real structural change in the societies in which we live.

And now, we are all citizens of the world...

Modern economic and technological changes have tied the fates of all the peoples of the world more closely together than ever before (and the US government's violent insertion of American soldiers into countries halfway around the globe has only accelerated that process.) So it strikes me that we all, US citizens and the other 96% of the world's people, have to start taking real responsibility for each other's wellbeing...

Getting all US military forces and bases out of Iraq is the first step towards that. (I might have added Afghanistan, though I realize there is a thicker cover of UN-sanctioned "legitimacy" for that presence.) Envisioning what a world system that truly reflects the value of human equality might look like, and how we can work towards it, is the crucial next step.

Human equality is a far, far better basis on which to build a world that offers real human security to all of us-- Americans and non-Americans-- than the continued pursuit of "manifest destiny" or any other assertion of "special rights" for Americans in the conduct of world affairs. But how can we be effective in persuading the 58 million Americans who voted for George Bush of this? I guess that's our next challenge.

... Well, I'm sitting here in Beirut, awaiting news of a hoped-for visa to Iran. This morning I went running along the Corniche here and reveled in the high, stormy seas battering the foundations of the corniche beside me. Every so often a particularly high swell would fling a plume of water 40 or 50 feet into the air... Luckily, only one of those soakers caught me as I ran.

The world is such a beautiful place. Why on earth do we sully it with violence, hatred, and killing when there are so many other, better ways to resolve our differences??

Post-conflict election: Mozambique

Mozambique will on Dec 1-2 be holding the third of the democratic national elections it has held since the termination of its civil war in 1992. If the election proceeds successfully, as seems to be expected, this will be yet another piece of evidence of the success of the country's whole conflict-termination experience.

I note in addition that in this election the ruling party, Frelimo, will have a new presidential candidate, Armando Guebuza, replacing Jose Chissano, who has now completed his two-term limit.

In a number of republics of course, either there are no term limits for the prez, or (as in Lebanon) a sitting president will find a way to allow the extension of his term beyond the prescribed limits. In the former case--and especially where an aging ruler is succeeded by a close family member-- you can end up with "presidential quasdi-monarchies", as in Syria or Egypt.

Guebuza was the chief negotiator for the Frelimo government side during the peace talks in Rome tyhat ended his country's civil war. From this interesting piece of reporting I learned that Raul Domingos, who was Guebuza's opposite number at the peace talks, will also be running.

Until early 2003, Domingos was a member of Renamo, which had been the main insurgent organization during the 1977-92 civil war and was then afterwards transformed into a peaceful political party. Since the 1994 elections, Renamo has been the main opposition party. But when I interviewed him in Maputo in April 2003 he had recently left the party, and was prearing, as I wrote then, to "regroup" politically.

The IRIN article linked to above says,

Considered to have the best prospects of breaking the bipartisan pattern of post-war politics is the Peace, Democracy and Development Party (PDD), which also has links to the war era: its leader and presidential candidate is Raul Domingos, who was formerly RENAMO's number two, and Guebuza's opposite number at the Rome peace talks.

Most analysts believe the PDD has a realistic chance of breaking through the threshold of 5 percent of the parliamentary vote needed to send a representative to the national assembly, and predict that the PDD's showing is likely to be strongest in RENAMO's traditional north-central stronghold. Domingos commands the same ethnic and regional loyalties as RENAMO, but is widely thought of as a more able and charismatic politician than his former boss, Dhlakama.

However, all the indications are that Frelimo will gain strong backing at the polls. I guess we'll know the results soon enough. (This article says that Dec 17 is the deadline by which the National Electoral Council needs to announce the final result.)

When I was writing the Mozambique chapters for my still-ongoing "Violence in Africa" book, I found and used lots of really detailed material about just how the landmark first election-- held in October 1994, a full two years after the conclusion of the peace agreement-- had been organized. Given how economically underdeveloped and indeed still heavily landmined and otherwise war-wracked the whole country was, many of the voter registratiuon teams that time round had to be helicoptered into the remote areas where they were deployed, and were dropped there along with all the materials they needed to register the voters in the area, tents for their own shelter, and hard rations to last them for three months... All that, because of the clear expectation that they would not be able to find food or lodging in the local markets that they could buy.

Now that's dedication!

The very best of luck to all my friends in Mozambique during the week ahead. Wish I was there!

Post-conflict election risks

Can hasty, ill-planned elections actually impede democratization in post-conflict societies? You bet they can. "It is one of the perverse realities of postconflict elections that this lynchpin of the democratic process can also be its undoing," argues Benjamin Reilly of the Australian National University in a recent book on "The U.N. Role in Promoting Democracy"

The book will be launched by its publishers-- the United Nations University-- in New York next Thursday. But some its main points have been previewed in an op-ed that university vice-rector Ramesh Thakur has in today's Daily Yomiori.

Thakur writes (fairly optimistically, imho) that, "in Afghanistan, the world's most fledgling democracy, President Hamid Karzai succeeded in legitimizing his rule through elections and preparing the ground for a longer-term peaceful system of power-sharing arrangements." Then he asks,

Will the same happen in Iraq in January? Hopefully, but not necessarily.

An election by itself cannot resolve deep seated problems, particularly in a society deeply traumatized by conflict. According to a new U.N. University study of experience in several countries, ill-timed or poorly designed elections in volatile situations can be quite dangerous. They risk producing the very opposite of the intended outcome, fuelling chaos and reversing progress toward democracy. They can exacerbate existing tensions, result in support for extremists or encourage patterns of voting that reflect wartime allegiances.

He notes that,

elections have had mixed success in meeting the broader goals of democratization. In some cases, such as Namibia and Mozambique, they played a vital role in making a decisive break with the past. In others, such as Angola, flawed elections created more problems than they solved. And in Bosnia premature elections helped to kick-start the fa�ade of democratic politics but also helped nationalist parties cement an early grip on political power.

It is still too early to judge how elections have influenced the peace-building process in other post conflict societies such as Kosovo, East Timor and Afghanistan. However, one of the most important lessons learned from recent U.N. missions is that imposing elections too early, for example while a country is still in conflict, can act as a catalyst for the development of parties and other organizations whose sole purpose is to help local elites keep a tight rein on power.

And he warns, quite rightly, of:

The risk ... that the domestic political need for an early exit strategy [i.e., domestic within the troop-contributing or occupying powers] can determine the timing of the election rather than the best moment for maximizing positive outcomes.

Thakur is far too diplomatic to name any names in this regard... One hint: it probably isn't Israel he's talking about, as having a "domestic political need for an early exit strategy."

Neo-Nazis in Israel

Sometimes, when you're running a well-funded colonial venture, you have to put up with having the most disturbing kinds of riff-raff queueing up to take part... But I suppose from the point of view of some Israelis, just so long as the riff-raff in question aren't, ahem, actually Palestinians seeking to return to their ancestral homes and homeland, then you'd be prepared to put up with them?

But Russian anti-Semites being given help to immigrate to Israel?? Now that's what I call a story... And Lucy Ash of BBC radio gives an interesting glimpse into it at the end of this piece, which was first aired yesterday.

Her piece is a broad look at what's been happening to the numbers of the Russian Jews (and non-Jews) who have migrated to Israel in a huge wave since the fall of the Soviet Union. While she leads with some reporting about the high numbers of recent Russian immigrants to Israel who have been "returning" to their earlier homeland, it was this part, lower down in the story, that caught my eye:

Zalman Gilichensky, a teacher from Jerusalem, claimed that people with very distant Jewish roots and even anti-Semites are being encouraged to move to Israel.

He said he has evidence of more than 500 outbreaks of anti-Semitism over the past year and he has set up a website to monitor them.

The incidents include swastika graffiti on the walls of synagogues, and verbal and physical abuse.

"The only way to stop these attacks is to change our immigration policy," Mr Gilichensky said. "It does not bother me that some non Jews come here.

"But I cannot see why we are importing people who hate our guts. Would-be immigrants should have to prove they know something of our history and respect our customs.

"But the government has done its best to sweep all this anti-Semitism under the carpet because these attacks are so damaging to the image of Israel."

Ash added that the Israeli Attorney-General has launched a criminal investigation into,

a neo-Nazi website [presumably in Russian?] which called itself the White Israeli Union, after pictures appeared of a man in an Israeli army uniform with his arm raised in a "Heil Hitler" salute.

But since then, other Russian language websites with similar content have appeared, with tasteless jokes about Jewish people and Holocaust denials.

I'd love to know, in addition to these disturbing reports of anti-Jewish anti-Semitism among Russian immigrants, whether anyone has done any studies on the extreme anti-Arab anti-Semitism that has also been reported among some Russian immigrants to Israel?

Interesting, though, that that website seemed to be peddling the discourse of "Whiteness"-- which of course makes quite possible the mobilization of hatred against Arabs as well as Jews (who in that context, I suppose, would be judged to be non-"White")...

Regarding out-migration (return) to Russia by former Russian immigrants to Israel, Ash cited a recent study that noted that of the roughly one million Russian immigrants to Israel, "at least 50,000" returned to Russia between 2001 and 2003.

She interviewed one Russian-Israeli, "Irena", who said,

"nobody here cares about your professional skills. Israelis just see Russians as people who have come over to clean their houses, look after old people or sweep the streets."

These days Irena mends clothes for a living but she was once chief designer at the Palace of Culture in Sochi, Russia's most famous Black Sea resort.

The town was badly affected by the rouble crash in 1998 so Irena went to Israel with 16 members of her family.

Now, 12 of them, including her husband, have already returned home.

Sochi is enjoying a revival with 6 million tourists each summer, and Irena's husband has already opened his second restaurant there.

By contrast Israel faces high unemployment and a stagnant economy.

Irena is also nervous about suicide bomb attacks, and worries about her son in the army. When he finishes his military service she plans to go back to Russia.

"I do not know why the government encouraged us to emigrate in the first place," she said.

"They promised us a beautiful future, but life here is pretty tough, and they should have warned us about that."

Yes, indeed.

Pentagon board trashes "public diplomacy" efforts

Today, the NYT published a story by Thom Shanker in which he wrote that,

A harshly critical report by a Pentagon advisory panel says the United States is failing in its efforts to explain the nation's diplomatic and military actions to the Muslim world, but it warns that no public relations plan or information operation can defend America from flawed policies.

The advisory panel in question was a "Strategic Communications Task Force" appointed by the Defense Science Board. (I think the DSB is the descendant of the historic DARPA agency, which gave the world the internet.)

So I rushed on over to the DSB's website and found the whole text of the 102-page report right there.

[Update, 11/27: For some reason, the above link doesn't work for everyone. (It still works for me, though.) However, The Federation of American Scientists has helpfully also put the text up on their site: here. Thanks to alert reader Allen for telling us about that.]

The report was presented to the folks in OSD--to, I think, Paul Wolfowitz-- back at the end of September. But I suppose nobody, including no-one I know of in the blogosphere, was paying much attention to that arcane corner of the OSD (Office of the Sec. of Defense) back then. People were mainly focused on the US elections. So it's taken till now for this fascinating report to get the attention it needs.

I skimmed through the whole thing really quickly this afternoon. It is actually, perhaps, even a bit "better" in many ways than Shanker writes. (In other portions though it's pretty bad: pablumy, and filled with media strategists' jargonizing.)

So anyway, thanks to my new skills in being able to copy large chunks o' text out of (some but not all) PDF files, here are some of the parts I found most interesting.

By the way, if you want to go to the link I gave above and read the whole thing, I'd advise you to go to Chapter 2 first, which is where the most interesting criticisms of "public diplomacy" efforts up to the present can be found.

Okay, Helena's annotated excerpts start here:

p.2:

Strategic communication [to be effective, will] ... build on indepth knowledge of other cultures and factors that motivate human behavior. It will adapt techniques of skillful political campaigning, even as it avoids slogans, quick fixes, and mind sets of winners and losers. It will search out credible messengers and create message authority. It will seek to persuade within news cycles, weeks, and months. It will engage in a respectful dialogue of ideas that begins with listening and assumes decades of sustained effort.

US policymakers, being urged to "engage in a respectful dialogue with others", and to "listen"?? Whoa, that's truly revolutionary...

Well, let's start right at the top, then:

p.3:

Nothing shapes U.S. policies and global perceptions of U.S. foreign and national security objectives more powerfully than the President?s statements and actions, and those of senior officials. Interests, not public opinion, should drive policies. But opinions must be taken into account when policy options are considered and implemented. At a minimum, we should not be surprised by public reactions to policy choices. Policies will not succeed unless they are communicated to global and domestic audiences in ways that are credible and allow them to make informed, independent judgments. Words in tone and substance should avoid offence where possible; messages should seek to reduce, not increase, perceptions of arrogance, opportunism, and double standards.

Like I said, some pretty revolutionary concepts there...

p.14:

The strategic environment has changed radically since the October 2001 Task Force report. We face a war on terrorism, intensified conflict within Islam, and insurgency in Iraq. Worldwide anger and discontent are directed at America?s tarnished credibility and ways the U.S. pursues its goals. There is consensus that America?s power to persuade is in a state of crisis. ...

... Although many observers correlate anti-Americanism with deficiencies in U.S. public diplomacy (its content, tone, and competence), the effectiveness of the means used to influence public opinion is only one metric. Policies, conflicts of interest, cultural differences, memories, time, dependence on mediated information, and other factors shape perceptions and limit the effectiveness of strategic communication.

The author(s) then go on to argue that the US government is, essentially, seeking to confront a 21st century problem, quite inappropriately, with mechanisms developed back at the beginning of the Cold War, nearly 60 years ago...

He/she/they wrote about the importance of the broad "frames" within which policymakers tend both to view and themselves to frame issues:

p.17:

Frames simplify and help to communicate complex events. But like the Cold War frame, the terrorism frame marginalizes other significant issues and problems: failing states, non-proliferation, HIV/AIDS pandemic, economic globalization, transnational threats other than terrorism, and global warming. Often the terrorism frame directs attention to tactics not strategy. The focus is more on capturing and killing terrorists than attitudinal, political, and economic forces that are the underlying source of threats and opportunities
in national security.

They then go on to talk about what they see as happening: a deep revivalist movement within Islam that faces the US with challenges very different from those it faced during the Cold War:

p.18:

Islam?s struggle raises critical considerations for strategic communication:
? The contest of ideas is taking place not just in Arab and other Islamic countries but in the cities and villages of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Western Hemisphere.
? U.S. policies on Israeli-Palestinian issues and Iraq in 2003-2004 have damaged America?s credibility and power to persuade.
? The hostile atmosphere in which terrorists act is reinforced by religious messages,
sophisticated media strategies, and advanced information technologies.
? Regimes based on consent may be intolerant and oppose U.S. policies.
? More sophisticated influence and attitudinal segmentation models are needed.
? Strategists face difficult trade-offs in determining feasible choices and funding
priorities in using persuasive, cooperative, and coercive instruments of power.

Well, as you can see, this is all deeply subversive stuff. (I wonder what Paul Wolfowitz thought when he read it?)

That part above was all from either the Introduction, or Ch. 1. In Chapter 2 it gets better:

p.34-36:

Our thorough inability to grasp the final dynamic changes that led to the end of the Cold War should be unsettling to us, but after all, the outcome was also a total victory. So the Cold War template was almost mythically anointed in the decade before 9/11. Thus, with the surprise announcement of a new struggle, the U.S. Government reflexively inclined toward Cold War-style responses to the new threat, without a thought or a care as to whether these were the best responses to a very different strategic situation.
...

There is an expectation that, like the Cold War, the U.S. will naturally create enduring alliances and coalitions. Moreover, if the Cold War could be described as a struggle against one form of totalitarianism ? Marxist-Leninism ? so too there is a desire to describe the ?War on Terrorism? as a struggle against yet another form of totalitarianism ? this time in the form of a radical Islamist vision. Thus the problem is presented as one of how to confront and eventually defeat another totalitarian evil. And as with the Cold War, many now also
declare that it is incumbent on the U.S. to assume leadership in this struggle.

But this is no Cold War [Emphasis in the original there]. We call it a war on terrorism ― but Muslims in contrast see a history-shaking movement of Islamic restoration. This is not simply a religious revival, however, but also a renewal of the Muslim World itself. And it has taken form through many variant movements, both moderate and militant, with many millions of adherents ― of which radical fighters are only a small part. Moreover, these movements for restoration also represent, in their variant visions, the reality of multiple identities within Islam.

If there is one overarching goal they share, it is the overthrow of what Islamists call the ?apostate? regimes: the tyrannies of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Jordan, and the Gulf states. They are the main target of the broader Islamist movement, as well as the actual fighter groups. The United States finds itself in the strategically awkward ? and potentially dangerous ? situation of being the longstanding prop and alliance partner of these authoritarian regimes. Without the U.S. these regimes could not survive. Thus the U.S. has strongly taken sides in a desperate struggle that is both broadly cast for all Muslims and country-specific.

This is the larger strategic context, and it is acutely uncomfortable: U.S. policies and actions are increasingly seen by the overwhelming majority of Muslims as a threat to the survival of Islam itself. Three recent polls of Muslims show an overwhelming conviction that the U.S. seeks to ?dominate? and ?weaken? the Muslim World. Not only is every American initiative and commitment in the Muslim World enmeshed in the larger dynamic of intra-Islamic hostilities ? but Americans have inserted themselves into this intra-Islamic struggle in ways that have made us an enemy to most Muslims.

Therefore, in stark contrast to the Cold War, the United States today is not seeking to contain a threatening state/empire, but rather seeking to convert a broad movement within Islamic civilization to accept the value structure of Western Modernity ? an agenda hidden within the official rubric of a ?War on Terrorism.?

But if the strategic situation is wholly unlike the Cold War, our response nonetheless has tended to imitate the routines and bureaucratic responses and mindset that so characterized that era. In terms of strategic communication especially, the Cold War emphasized:

? Dissemination of information to ?huddled masses yearning to be free.? Today wereflexively compare Muslim ?masses? to those oppressed under Soviet rule. This is a strategic mistake. There is no yearning-to-be-liberated-by-the-U.S. groundswell among Muslim societies ? except to be liberated perhaps from what they see as apostate tyrannies that the U.S. so determinedly promotes and defends. [Emphasis in original.]

? An enduringly stable propaganda environment. The Cold War was a status quo
setting that emphasized routine message-packaging ? and whose essential objective was the most efficient enactment of the routine. In contrast the situation in Islam today is highly dynamic, and likely to move decisively in one direction or another. The U.S. urgently needs to think in terms of promoting actual positive change.

? An acceptance of authoritarian regimes as long as they were anti-communist. This could be glossed over in our message of freedom and democracy because it was the main adversary only that truly mattered. Today, however, the perception of intimate U.S. support of tyrannies in the Muslim World is perhaps the critical vulnerability in American strategy. It strongly undercuts our message, while strongly promoting that of the enemy.
...

p.39:

A truly global network is reshaping politics, diplomacy, warfare ? all social interaction. Just one example: the ability of a blogger in a conflict zone to capture a digital image of an atrocity, upload it, paste it on a webpage, and have it available to millions in minutes is a startling development.

Here is just one example of information age implications for old-style info-agency organization. While we focus inward our adversary is focusing outward, truly reaching and motivating those they hope to enlist against us. The U.S. has always operated from the proposition that in the ?war of ideas? and the competition of ideologies, one form of governance and society functions best when the bright light of free-flowing information is pulsing ? among free and democratic societies ? while another ? the tyrannical and fascistic ? functions with difficulty, if at all, under those circumstances. Yet the paradox today is that our enemy is thriving in an environment of free and open information flows. [HC emphasis] Thus our challenge is to transcend Cold War clichés, to seek out new and creative responses ? especially in the realm of strategic communication ? and to do so most urgently, because at this moment it is the enemy that has the advantage.
...

p.40-41:

American direct intervention in the Muslim World has paradoxically elevated the stature of and support for radical Islamists, while diminishing support for the United States to single-digits in some Arab societies.

? Muslims do not ?hate our freedom,? but rather, they hate our policies.[HC emphasis] The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf states.

? Thus when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy. Moreover, saying that ?freedom is the future of the Middle East? is seen as patronizing, suggesting that Arabs are like the enslaved peoples of the old Communist World ? but Muslims do not feel this way: they feel oppressed, but not enslaved.

? Furthermore, in the eyes of Muslims, American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq has not led to democracy there, but only more chaos and suffering. U.S. actions appear in contrast to be motivated by ulterior motives, and deliberately controlled in order to best serve American national interests at the expense of truly Muslim selfdetermination.

? Therefore, the dramatic narrative since 9/11 has essentially borne out the entire radical Islamist bill of particulars. American actions and the flow of events have elevated the authority of the Jihadi insurgents and tended to ratify their legitimacy among Muslims. Fighting groups portray themselves as the true defenders of an Ummah (the entire Muslim community) invaded and under attack ? to broad public support.

? What was a marginal network is now an Ummah-wide movement of fighting groups. Not only has there been a proliferation of ?terrorist? groups: the unifying context of a shared cause creates a sense of affiliation across the many cultural and sectarian boundaries that divide Islam.

? Finally, Muslims see Americans as strangely narcissistic ? namely, that the war is all about us. As the Muslims see it, everything about the war is ? for Americans ? really no more than an extension of American domestic politics and its great game. This perception is of course necessarily heightened by election-year atmospherics, but nonetheless sustains their impression that when Americans talk to Muslims they arereally just talking to themselves.

Thus the critical problem in American public diplomacy directed toward the Muslim World is not one of ?dissemination of information,? or even one of crafting and delivering the ?right? message. Rather, it is a fundamental problem of credibility. Simply, there is none ? the United States today is without a working channel of communication to the world of Muslims and of Islam. Inevitably therefore, whatever Americans do and say only serves the party that has both the message and the ?loud and clear? channel: the enemy.

And finally, this, repeated a few times throughout the report.... Here, from the top of p.46:

In other words, they do not hate us for our values, but because of our policies.

It remains to be seen, of course, whether the many recommendations that the task force makes in its report will be implemented. Some are generally "good" things like more citizen-to-citizen exchanges, etc etc. Others, like those designed to increase the effectiveness of the Department of Defense and the US military, seem far more scary.

But regardless of the recommendations, the analysis there is really interesting. Given the content of that portion of the report, I wouldn't hold my breath regarding any of the rest of it being taken up and adopted by the Bush administration....

Anguish in ICRC over Iraq

The Swiss daily Le Temps yesterday (11/24) had an article (purchase reqd) about the dilemmas the International Committee of the Red Cross has been facing in Iraq. The piece is by Richard Werly, one of the few Swiss journos who have been able to work in Iraq in recent weeks.

Ominously, the piece is titled, "After two weeks of fighting, Falludjah is still closed to the ICRC convoys".

Alert JWN readers will of course be aware that the ICRC is not "just another" international humanitarian aid organization, but it's the international body that is charged by the world's governments with guarding the integrity of, and supervising the implementation of, nearly the whole body of the international "laws of war" -- Geneva Conventions, the Hague Conventions, etc etc.

So when the ICRC gets systematically stymied in its work, this is a serious development in international affairs, and could mark a continuation of the desire of many in the Pentagon to "roll back" the entire structure of the laws of war.

(My big thanks to the JWN reader who supplied the translation here.)

Here's how Werly starts:

Can the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) still work in Iraq? The question comes back more bluntly after the bloody battle of Falludjah, the Sunni insurgents' stronghold retaken by the US Marines and their Iraqi allies. Two weeks after the assault was launched on the 8th of November and while sporadic fightings are still going on, neither a crew nor a humanitarian convoy of the ICRC have been able to enter in this city of about 200 000 inhabitants...

The last attempt of the organization to convey help supplies in the field goes back to Saturday 13th November. The ICRC delegation in Baghdad had loaded packages of food and drugs in a convoy of humanitarian trucks[organized by] the Iraqi Red Crescent which was never able to drive through the US military checkpoints... [T]he freight brought by the convoy was finally distributed [outside the city] to the families of the wounded who had been able to flee the fighting zone by their own means. And Falludjah since then remains out of reach.

Another convoy of the Red Crescent was turned back on Monday [Nov. 22?]. "We still haven't obtained the needed guarantees of security from the different parties in conflict and cannot get in under our usual conditions: without military escort and with the freedom to distribute aid to all the population", acknowledges Ahmed Rawi, the ICRC spokesman in Baghdad with whom we talked by phone. "We hope to be able to reach there in one or two days."

We should recall that the long-time modus operandi of the ICRC as it performs its work in conflict zones is one of extreme caution in public statements. ICRC envoys in various war zones-- called "Delegates"-- have anguished over this caution for many decades; but still, the organization as a whole prefers to say nothing in public that might give recalcitrant power-holders on the ground any pretext at all for blocking the organization's ability to deliver basic humaitarian services to people under the power-holders' control.

"Naming and shaming" power-holders for their rights abuses may be the main modus operandi of some of the human-rights monitoring groups. Personally, I don't have much faith in the idea of "shaming" people in public as being a good tool of persuasion; but self-appointed rights monitoring groups like Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International are big on "naming & shaming"... But then, what they do is very different from what the ICRC does. They do not actually provide any direct services to beleaguered populations under stress. The ICRC, by contrast, has a responsibility, under a whole series of international treaties and agreements, to implement its mandate of winning humanitarian access to noncombatants in times of armed conflict and ensuring the delivery of the urgent humanitarian aid that they need.

Werly writes about the tough conditions in which the ICRC's remaining Delegates inside Iraq are forced to work, and the anguish this has caused them. He notes:

The continual degradation of [the organization's] working conditions in Iraq; the organization, shaken by the bombing of its headquarters in Baghdad on the 27th October 2003, is now restricted to the role of the alarmed and powerless spectator; it is caught between the insurgents and the US forces, like all the other humanitarian agencies, who, incidentally, are deserting the country one after the other.

The tone of the statement issued the 19th November by the Director of Operation, Pierre Kräehenbühl, shows how concerned the headquarters in Geneva are. "Every day passing in Iraq seems to bring news of yet another act of utter contempt for the most basic tenet of humanity: the obligation to protect human life and dignity", he exclaimed. These words conceal a growing disheartening of the ICRC and of its delegates in the field, delegates who are constrained to live in quasi-secrecy (unmarked cars, secret quarters and restricted travelling) for security reasons. "Each day, the contempt for the international humanitarian law is increasing in Iraq. Remaining out of reach of the wounded and of the civilian victims becomes unbearable", confirms a well informed source in Baghdad.

The case of Fallujah is illustrative. Even if most of the population fled the city before the assault, the images prove the violence of the fights and imply a much heavier number of casulties than announced by the American forces.

Even worse: the first hand account of Kevin Sites, who filmed the execution of awounded Iraqi by a Marine, confirms that wounded Iraqi figthters were left to their fate. In his weblog, published on the internet (www.kevinsites.net), this experienced war reporter tells that the wounded present in the mosquee taken by the Marines were there since the day before, lying in their blood, having only received first aid. Yet, assistance to the victims is the fundamental mission of the ICRC, isn’t it? What then, of its attitude toward the American forces in charge of the city? Toward forces who have pompously announced the presence in the field of a battalion in charge of "reconstruction". Above all, what of the feelings of the Iraqis as they see the ICRC reduced to the role of spectator?

Werly notes that the other main problem confronting the ICRC in Iraq is that of all the many "security"-related prisoners and detainees in the country:

The main mission of the ICRC in Iraq today is to visit the prisoners held by the Iraqi authorities and by the multinational force, which the Interim Government of Baghdad authorized to continue to arrest suspects, after the official transfer of power on the 30th June. Approximately every six weeks, the ICRC delegates are visiting the main known jails in the country, like the infamous prison of Abu Graib, the incarceration center of Camp Bukka, or Camp Cropper near of the airport, where the dignitaries of the former regimes, and among them Saddam Hussein, are held.

But here again, too many shadow zones are darkening the picture. Lots of Iraqis have been arrested in Fallujah, but no information has emerged concerning their fate.

The existence of secret detention places, where the insurgents are herded and interrogated before transfer to bigger centers of internment is not much of a secret. Asked about it, the ICRC says that it is "limited by its human resources". "It goes without saying, that we are going to ask access to all the detained, next time we begin our visits, as we always do", adds Rana Sidani, one of the spokespersons in Geneva.

Talking of the prisoner-visiting program, here's news of one prisoner in Iraq who got his regular visit from the ICRC recently. You guessed. It was Saddam Hussein. According to the ICRC spokesman, this was the fifth visit they'd been able to make to him since his capture last December. "The ICRC discussed (Saddam’s) state of health with the detaining party while underlining the right of every prisoner to medical supervision in accordance with the Geneva conventions," spokesman Mwein Kais told AFP in Amman.

I am glad-- I really am-- that the deposed former dictator is thus far having most of his rights, including his right to regular ICRC visitation, adequately respected. But it strikes me as perverse in the extreme that the "detaining authorities"-- that is, I believe, the US forces-- would be so attentive to meeting its humanitarian obligations to that one individual while being quite shameless about refusing to allow any basic humanitarian access by the ICRC or the local Red Crescent Society in the case of the far needier and more numerous population of Fallujah.

Author of the Palestinian "democracy hurdle"?

Today's WaPo has an intriguing article by Dana Milbank in which he writes that just nine days after Bush's re-election he had a special meeting in the White House with Natan Sharansky... Or, as Milbank describes him, "an Israeli politician so hawkish that he has accused Ariel Sharon of being soft on the Palestinians."

Sharansky has apparently recently co-authored a book called "The Case for Democracy", which argues that nothing should be given to the Palestinians at all until they have established a full democracy. (Under conditions of foreign military occupation?? Exactly how are they supposed to do that, again?) His publisher got copies of the galleys to Prez Bush, who was so impressed that he (a) invited Sharansky over and (b) incorporated most of his ideas into the policy toward the Palestinians that he outlined at the joint press conference with Blair.

As Milbank writes,

Sharansky made waves this spring when he rallied with Jewish settlers to oppose the Likud prime minister's plan for a unilateral pullout from Gaza -- a plan that Bush had endorsed. Sharansky, head of a Russian immigrant political party, said Sharon's plan, though supported by a number of Likud hard-liners, would be "encouraging more terror." A figure who has previously railed against the "illusions of Oslo" and described that famous accord as "one-sided concessions," Sharansky resigned in 2000 from Ehud Barak's government over the Labor prime minister's plan to attend a peace summit in Washington.

"He's been suffering in the political wilderness in Israel with these ideas for some time," [his co-author Ron] Dermer said of [Sharansky]. But when it came to Bush, Dermer said, "I didn't see a lot of daylight between them."

This whole idea that a nation must be fully democratic before it can allowed its independence is quite bizarre, and quite a-historical. Did the US colonists have a full range of their own fully democratic institutions before they fought for and won their independence from the British Crown? Of course not! It took them 13 more years, as I recall, to work out the details of the US Constitution.

In the modern (i.e. post-WW2) era, no other nation has been obliged to "prove" its democratic credentials before being given independence... Of course, a working democracy is a very desirable thing. But to make it a precondition for national independence? That is the bizarre thing.

Anyway, I could write a bunch about this whole cart-before-horse idea, but I have to go... Just finally, though, I'd note that the tired old proposition that "democracies don't launch wars against other nations" is palpable nonsense in the present era.

Syria-2

(From Damascus. Written Tuesday evening.) As I started writing this, the plaintive quarter tones of the evening call to prayer were reverberating from the minaret very near to us. Now, that one's stopped and I can hear other ones coming thinly from other minarets around town. On Saturday, when we had dinner at a restaurant up on Jebel Kassioun looking down on the city, we could see many of its minarets picked out with green neon lighting: little green spears sticking up from a broad, spreading carpet of orange street lights and lit-up homes.

From ground-level I've seen some of the churches that have blue lighting for the crosses topping them. Sunday evening we wandered around the shadowed streets of the Old City's Christian Quarter and heard the broad tones of heavy church bells. Church bells on a cold and rainy Sunday evening... that reminds me of so many poignant things about my childhood.

Last night, we went out to dinner with Mahat Farah Khoury, an older woman with a long career as a writer and journalist who for many years s also directed the local office of the Middle East Council of Churches. The weather had been whipping up for a storm throughout most of the day and by the time we left her house for the restaurant at 9:15 p.m. it was snowing in town.

This morning, it was still very cold. I looked from the hotel-room window up to Kassioun, which was wearing a cape of white snow on its craggy, sandy-colored outcroppings. The Palestinian professor who'd been planning to come into town to meet us this morning called to say that her home, over toward the Lebanon border, was quite snowed in. Bill and I decided that--since it wasn't actually snowing or raining--we should get out and do some good walking around town. First, we went to an oud (lute) maker whose location in Souq as-Surouja we found in the Lonely Planet, to do a little business. We made a few wrong turns along the way. But eventually we made a single turn north from the modern-day bustle of Shukri Kuwatly Street, and descended three steps from there back almost straight into the middle of the 19th century. That little street had square cobbles; it was lined with two-story wattle-and-daub houses and shops, many with second-floor balconies or wood-latticed windows canted out over the street on thick wooden beams. Over the street, too, hung the limp vestiges of what, in the summer, must have been shady grape arbours.

We found the oud maker's place easily there. It was a tiny storefront with an oud hanging outside it. Inside, the craftsman (Nabil) sat filing away at the neck of an insturment. His entire stock was hung in the store above him, and there was barely enough floor space for Nabil, his apprentice, Bill, me, and Nabil's electric lathe, so whenever anyone wanted to move everyone else had to make adjustments in three dimensions. We did not buy an oud then and there...

After we left we took a cab to the Bab al-Saghir ("Little Gate"), at the far side of the walled Old City. Foolishly, we exited the cab quite some way away from the Bab al-Saghir, and had to walk back to it between large walled cemeteries. Our destination was two once-private houses within the Old City that the LP had identified as gems of mid-18th century architecture: the Sibai House and the Nizam House. The LP was, as so often, completely right. These two houses were more run-down and slightly smaller versions of the Azem Palace, which we'd revisited on Sunday. All three grand homes were built in the distinctive Damascene style of banded layers of contrasting dark and light stone: lovely, complex structures built around internal courtyards graced by fountains and big old citrus trees; all of them sport beautifully airy, high-arched diwans-- reception rooms that have gorgeous painted-woode ceilings and one side completely open onto the fountains of the main (male-only) courtyard.

We poked around a little in each house. Private homes are the hidden treaures of the walled cities of the old Middle East. As you pass down the twisty, mean alleys that snake through the cities, their thousands of private homes carefully hide their charms from the prying eyes of outsiders (and from the heat of the summer sun.) But once you go into thehomes, including many even of the smallest ones, you find these stunning courtyards and living spaces designed for privacy and relaxation. My ex-husband had cousins who lived in just such a place near the Bab al-Sharqi (Eastern Gate) here. Now, though, that one has been turned into some kind of a tourist magnet and has neon all over its front...

Well, we didn't go there this morning. After the two houses that we did see we headed north for a possible stop at one of the coffee-houses to the east of the Omayyad Mosque. But on one tiny lane we were walking along there, my eye was suddenly riveted by a storefront displaying some superb Palestinian-style embroideries. (Anyone who knows me knows what a sucker I am for these.) So we had to go in. The work was beautiful: intricate, well designed, and well finished. It was made by women in the Yarmouk refugee camp, the salesman told us. They used traditional Palestinian designs (as we could see), but the work was made up into sales goods according to ideas and patterns provided a German women of whose work in this field we had already heard. How lucky that we'd found this little cluster of stores! We hurried out half an hour later with several Christmas presents tucked under our arms...

In the early evening, we went back to the oud maker. Our order wasn't ready yet. So we walked along to the Old City, which we approached this time from the northwest corner, walking along the cobbled road that runs between the northen edge of the massive Ottoman citadel and the tumbling gray waters of the Barada River. At the point where the Citadel ended we turned south into the Old City and walked along a narrow but still busy street (Housewares-ville, you could call this area of the souk, I think) until we hit the Souk al-Hamidiyeh (Embroidered Brassieres, truly louche Belly-dance Outfits, and Tableclothes-ville-- nearly all of it).

We turned east along the barrel-vaulted space of the Hamidiyeh, dodging the importunings of several tablecloth salesmen, came to the Omayyad Mosque, and walked around to arrive at the point Bill had identified earlier in the day as the location of a couple of interesting coffee-houses. Indeed, the one we went into had truly--as the Lonely Planet told us-- been installed inside the lovely, banded-stone building of a former Arab-style hammam (bath-house). We mounted very steep steps to go in, then wandered through a number of the hammam's different chambers, each one now furnished with simple tables and chairs for coffee-drinkers and narghileh-smokers. The domed ceilings had glass sunlight catchers studded into them. Once painted white, the domes were now slicked with the tawny residues of hundreds of narghilehs. On the banded-stone walls hung some ancient grainy photographs of the city.

I'm always a little wary of Middle Eastern coffee-houses as being (predominantly) male spaces. But this one had several women clients and people did not make me feel out-of-place at all. We had mint tea while admiring the surroundings and listening to the "click-clack" of two men playing backgammon in the next room. The other clients in our room were three young-ish people speaking Persian. Everything was very relaxed.

I guess I haven't mentioned anything about the large numbers of Iranian tourists here in the city. There are a number of Shi-ite holy places in and around Damascus. So despite the fact that the city was predominantly the headquarters of the contested Caliph Omayya, scourge of the Shi-ites, many Shi-ites like to come here on religious pilgrimages, and given the fairly close political links between the Syrian and Iranian governments, the Iranians facilitate or perhaps even help support the visits here of scores of thousands of Iranian pilgrims each year. You can see them in the main souqs during shopping hours: mainly women... flocks of figures swathed in chadors in a range of plain black or flowered fabrics, all clustered together around a tour guide. When Bill was in the Omayyad Mosque the other day he saw several groups of them there, though the main item there of religious significance to Shi-ites is apparently the alleged head of Hussein Ibn Ali, brought there as a trophy by Omayya's followers after they had vanquished him in battle. Memorialization is an interesting thing.

* * *

So which interesting people have we been seeing here? One was Sheikh Salah Kuftaro, President of the Abu Nour Foundation, a Sunni Muslim institute of higher learning founded by the late Grand Mufti of Syria, Sheikh Ahmed Kuftaro. Sheikh Ahmed passed away some three months ago at a very advanced age.

We had a very warm welcome from Sheikh Salah, whom I had met two years ago when I was in Syria with two other members of our Quaker delegation. This time, I gave him a copy of the book that resulted from that whole, region-wide fact-finding mission. Then, he talked with Bill and me more about the current situation. He said that people in Syria feel very angry about what the Americans have been doing in Falloujah, and disaapointed in the lack of any effective response to that from many Arab governments. (No real surprise there, perhaps.)

The whole Abu Nour Foundation is a very interesting project. The Syrian regime, which has always prided itself on its "modern", secular nature, had its own, very violent encounter with Sunni extremism back in the early 1980s. At that time, Sunni militants made many attacks against regime-related targets and along the way killed scores or perhaps hundreds of Syrian civilians. The government cracked down very hard. In February 1982 it counter-attacked, launchinga military-scale assault against the militants' main stronghold in the northern city of Hama that leveled a number of city blocks in the center of the city-- including its historic Grand Mosque. Perhaps as many as 1,200 or so civilians were killed there... That assault, and a few years of maintaining tight police measures against suspected militants, beat back the "threat" that the militants had posed to the country. In a parallel measure, the regime encouraged the development by people connected with the Grand Mufti of a more "modern", liberal strand of Sunni Islam to which believers could adhere... So that's where we were: the Abu Nour Foundation.

Sheikh Salah said he could agree with the American project of putting an end to Saddam Hussein's regime. But he also said he strongly opposed many of the things the Americans had done in Iraq ever since then-- especially, the massive use of force against Fallujah and other places. And he speculated that many in the Bush administration seemed to be driven by a brand of fundamentalism that seemed almost exactly to mirror that of Osama Bin Laden. Arguing from his reading of the Muslim holy texts he spoke strongly against the use of violence in all circumstances except in cases of immediate self-defense. And he decried any use of aggressive violence that claimed to be motivated by "religion". He criticized Bin Laden very harshly on this score-- as he also criticized people who kidnap and kill civilians in a place like Iraq.

On church and state issues, he argued that religious institutions should not seek to take over the powers of governments. Indeed, he said, "religion should return to the mosques."

Many people in the west love to whine and complain and say "Where are the Muslim voices that speak out against Bin Laden?" Perhaps they should look in a place like Syria-- and also listen carefully to everything else a very moderate Muslim thinker like Sheikh Salah Kuftaro says, as well...

We also had a good meeting (in Gemini, one of Damascus's absolutely hippest restaurants) with my friend and colleague Ibrahim Hamidi, the bureau chief for Al-Hayat here in Damascus. I was so happy to see him! The last time I saw him, when I was here in December 2002, we had a couple of really interesting discussions-- and then, just four days later he was thrown into jail on what looked very much like a trumped-up accusation of "disclosing state secrets." Some time later he was sentenced to, I believe, six years imprisonment. He spent five months ("five months and two days," he told us, to be precise) in jail, all or nearly all of it in solitary confinement. And then, in late May 2003, he was released..

As we sat down to lunch I started asking him about the whole experience he had gone through in prison. He said he was never tortured in any direct way, either physically or mentally. But he found the solitary confinement hard to bear. He said he could not speak at all for a couple of days after he was released. In addition, that winter was bitterly cold, and he came out with problems in his knees that required lengthy physiotherapy. He said he realized pretty early on during his imprisonment that he needed to take good care of himself, both physically and mentally, on the supposition it was possible he'd be in jail for the rest of his life. "I made a systematic attempt to get to know myself," he said at one point. He also said he walked up and down his cell for around seven hours per day.

Right now he's free-- and working again-- under some kind of parole-like arrangement, though he still has to go back to the police for periodic hearings. The next one is on December 23rd. I asked him if it was okay for me to write about what he'd told me of his prison experiences. He thought a moment, then said "Yes."

We talked a bunch about many other things... Including that just last February, he got married. His wife, Dima Wannous, is a translator and has recently completed a translation from French to Arabic of The Pianist. For which, he said, she already has a publisher here... (Longtime JWN readers might remember that I really loved-- if that's the right word-- the movie of The Pianist. Actually, I found the book even more striking than the movie, for a number of reasons.) But how great if the translation will be published here... I know, when I was in Ramallah in February, that several of Palestinian friends there had been to a screening of the movie held in an art cinema there, and had found it very moving.

... Well, it's Wednesday morning now. I need to go find out what's up with the world. Later today, we're hoping to see Sadeq al-Azem, the great Syrian intellectual who's this year's winner of Europe's ultra-prestigious Erasmus Prize, and then drive back to Beirut. Let's hope Sadeq has the time to see us and that the passes over the mountains to Beirut are open in the late afternoon....

Election news- Palestine

Election plans for both Palestine and Iraq are in the news. In Iraq, they are being planned with a view to the possible withdrawal of the occupation forces-- certainly, a total withdrawal is what the vast majority of Iraqis want to see ensue after them.

In Palestine, it is less clear what will ensue from the elections scheduled for January 9. Clearly, the consensus among Palestinians for a total withdrawal of the forces occupying their country is even stronger than the consensus among Iraqis in that regard. But the Israelis are not about to simply do that, election or no election.

Here, by the way, is the column I had in Monday's CSM on the Palestinian election issue. I argue there that the "diaspora" Palestinians-- that is, those millions of Palestinian refugees whom Israel still prevents from returning even to the area of the future Palestinian state-- should be represented in the upcoming elections...

I have to say that, regrettably, it ain't going to happen. Well, not this time, anyway.

Many, many contacts are going on now in preparation for the Palestinian elections, which are solely for the position of 'chairman' (or 'president') of the Oslo-decreed 'Palestinian authority'. Which doesn't actually have much, if any, real authority. But will be heading the negotiations with the Israelis from here on out.

Each of the major Palestinian groups/blocs will be presenting its candidate, and several 'independents' have announced their candidacy too. There's a possibility that Fateh will nominate Marwan Barghouthi, who's in jail in Israel serving five life terms. He could then become a Mandela-like icon figure. Interesting...

Update: They ended up choosing Abu Mazen... However, Marwan's cousin Dr Mustapha Barghouthi is mentioned as a possibility for the "leftist" candidate...

The Islamists (Hamas, Jihad) say they won't participate in this election because of its connection with Oslo, which they always opposed. They and the leftist parties are calling for simultaneous or rapid legislative council and municipal elections.

Interestingly, though, Abu Mazen and Co-- the leaders for now of Fateh, the PA, and the PLO's wing inside the occupied territories-- are making serious efforts to coordinate their positions with the political forces in the Palestinian diaspora and with important Palestinian "host countries" like Jordan and Syria. All these are possibilities that have been opened up by Arafat's death, since he had succeeded in pissing off just about all those other important players.

Abu Mazen and Abu Ala are expected here in Syria in the near future, which will mark a real political change on both sides. Interesting if Syria and the Palestinian leadership find a way to coordinate their diplomatic position again-- coordination which was notably broken when Arafat concluded the bilateral Oslo peace accord with Israel in 1993... Which as we know got him very little and his people even less. Indeed the number of Israeli settlers in the occupied territories doubled in the 7 years after Oslo.

I think his strategic "mistake", from the Palestinian point of view, was to get dragged into niggling little negotiations over a lengthy series of always "interim" measures, while allowing Israel and the US to renege completely on all the deadlines for negotiating the final status. But boy, did he ever love the international attention he got throughout that whole process...

Notable: how quickly Sharon's government caved on the issue of the East Jerusalemites being allowed to participate in the Palestinian election, once the Bush administration made clear its preferences on this point ....

How about the Bushies make equally clear their insistence on a real end to all new Israeli investment in the quite illegal settlement-building project??? I hold my breath...

Anyway, interesting times in Palestinian politics. As in Iraqi politics, too. If Bombs-Away Don and his buddies leave any space clear at all in occupied Iraq for "politics", that is.

Syria-1 (and Lebanon)

(Written Sunday) This morning we visited the 1,300-year-old Omayyad Mosque. We saw a 1,000-year-old Islamic madrasa (school) and a stunning 250-year-old palace and nearby khan (a merchant's lodging- and meeting-house). We walked along the Street Called Straight. I shopped a little in the broad, cavernous Souq al-Hamidieh, and Bill took some photos... Having thus reimmersed ourselves in the busy rhythms of Damascus's Old City, a couple of taxi rides and a quick change of clothes later we were sitting with Syria's Minister of Expatriate Affairs, the feminist former litterateuse Bouthaina Shaaban.

It was a short, informal discussion. Dr. Shaaban is going to Geneva tomorrow to take part in a meeting on "women and peace", but she slotted us into her schedule at the last minute. I last saw her-- even more briefly-- when I was in Damascus in December 2002. This time, I asked how the atmosphere had been in Damascus back in May or June of last year when the Americans, fresh from having vanquished Saddam's regime in Iraq, was making very belligerent noises about Syria. "We were never afraid," she said. "What could we do? We are are here, and we'll stay here."

She said she thought Foreign Minister Farouq Shara would be going to the "summit" on Iraqi reconstruction that starts tomorrow in Sharm al-Shaikh, Egypt. She said she hoped the summit could help to find a way to make elections happen in Iraq, and that Iraq's neighboring states-- all of whom will be represented at the meeting-- could play a role in that...

Moving briefly to a consideration of the Palestinian-Israeli issue, she said that the Arab states are all still quite committed to the "Beirut Declaration" of March 2002, in which they promised that they would all make a full peace with Israel and normalize their relations with it, in return for a full Israeli withdrawal to the lines of before the 1967 Mideast war. However, all three of us in the room knew full well, I think, that the League of Arab States has never mounted any effective campaign to implement this plan, whether by persuading Israel and its supporters of its benefits or by using any other means...

Dr. Shaaban is a friendly, engaging woman, in maybe her late forties, who talked with us in an informal and low-key way amongst the brocaded formality of her ministry's nearly brand-new building. Getting to the building had been an interesting, fairly eye-opening experience in itself...

Yesterday, as we drove into Damascus from the border we took a road that was new to me, since I hadn't made the trip here from Beirut by car since 1981. Shortly before the new highway swooped over the last set of hills into the city, we suddenly saw huge vistas of new and almost-new high-rises clumped on a ring of hillsides to our left. I think her ministry building was probably one of those buildings. Today, when we got a taxi from the hotel and asked the driver to take us to the Expatriates' Ministry, he took us south and west over one of the shoulders of Mount Kassioun, and we saw the new areas of high-rises from, effectively, the opposite direction... And they went on and on and on: some looking like decent middle-class housing, and some like much fancier condos for upper-middle-class families. Huge, huge amounts of investment there over the past 10-12 years.

Last night, when we sat in the restaurant up near the top of Kassioun and looked down at the (main part of the) city, our host told us that after the Gulf War of 1991-- to which Syria contributed a few troops that fought on the same side as the Saudis, the other Gulf Arab states, and the Americans-- relations between Syria and most Gulf states improved very markedly. One result of that was that large numbers of Syrians were able to work in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf countries. Some combnation of those expats' remittances and investment in Syria by Gulf nationals no doubt accounts for a significant part of the economic growth the country has experienced over the past decade.

Right down the road from our hotel, Prince Al-Waleed ibn Talal, the Saudi prince whose donation of $10 million to New York City after 9/11/2001 Rudy Giuliani notably (and, I would say, in an unbelievably racist way) turned down, is building a gargantuan great complex that will be the Four Seasons Hotel. He's also building another one, on prime seaside real estate, in the heart of the Beirut downtown.

* * *

Riding in the car from Beirut yesterday, I was reading the Beirut daily An-Nahar, which had a glaring, page-one lead reporting on an anti-Syrian demonstration held in Beirut on Friday, in connection with the Independence Day celebrations there. I know I haven't written much (or perhaps, even, anything) here yet about the whole tangled question of Syrian-Lebanese relations, which have become something of an international cause célèbre since the US and France-- acting together!-- pushed a resolution through the Security Council calling on Syria to withdraw the troops it still has in Lebanon and to cease intervening in Lebanon's internal affairs.

Well, coming from the US, a power that has massively "intervened" in the internal affairs of scores of countries around the globe, including of course Iraq, I always thought that resolution, number 1559, was the absolute height of hypocrisy... But it's become a big factor in Lebanese internal affairs since it was passed at, I think, the beginning of September. Some Lebanese Christians became empowered by it to step up their long-simmering campaign to get Syria out of their country completely.

Actually, the large influence that Syria has over Lebanon's internal affairs is resented within Lebanon by many other Lebanese people, in addition to some-- though not all-- the Christians there. The kinds of grievances Lebanese people mention include accusations that Syria, and especially, well-connected Syrian government officials, have been profiting from their involvement with key Lebanese economic institutions including Beirut's port, and that poorly paid Syrian workers have been flooding the labor market in Lebanon. ("One million Syrian laborers," is the figure most commonly heard, though some Lebanese say that it's probably an exaggeration.)

For some Christian Lebanese, these quite understandable grievances are overlaid with a thick coating of pure, unadulterated hate-talk of a kind that they're only too happy to spout whenever they're speaking with a westerner. This hate-talk is directed almost equally against "Muslims", and against "Arabs". (The kind of "Christian" Lebanese who engage in this hate-talk definitely don't think of themselves as Arabs, though to any outsider and by just about any objective ethnographic consideration they would seem to be so.)

I have to say, when I hear people engaging in such hate-talk-- and especially under circumstances where they assume that, simply because you're a westerner you're going to agree with all their diatribes against the "dirty", "uneducated", etc etc Arabs and Muslims-- something inside me curls up and just wants to die. Why do they assume I share their racist inclinations? How can I even start to challenge some of their grotesque and hate-filled accusations?

I have a deeper, underlying fear as well. Back in the 1970s, when I was covering the civil war in Lebanon, the areas held by the extremist "Christian" militias were completely open to, indeed dominated by, direct genocidal incitement. Throughout East Beirut, the walls had the stenciled-on slogan "It's the duty of every Lebanese to kill a Palestinian". Ala kul lubnani in yuqtil filastiniyan. I never saw anyone trying to cover those slogans over or otherwise erase them: they loomed over the public streets there for years.

And I saw, counted, smelled, and examined the putrifying phsyical remains of a good number of the thousands of Palestinians-- women, children, men, old people-- who were killed in the enactment of that openly genocidal campaign.

I should say that for the 7 years I lived in Beirut back then, I never saw any signs of a genocidal incitement being mounted against the Christians by the Palestinians or Muslims. In predominantly Muslim West Beirut, where I lived, fully one-third of the residents including my husband at the time were Christian. Several of the leaders of the Palestinian and leftist organizations involved in the civil war were themselves Christian. One entire Lebanese party in their coalition, the Syrian Social National Party, was made up almost entirely of (Orthodox) Christians... Yes, "excesses" were committed by the Muslim-leftist-Palestinian side in that phase of the civil war. As in any civil war. But there were never any open, mass campaigns of anti-Christian incitement. How could there be when George Habash, Naef Hawatmeh, George Hawi, Abdullah Saadeh, and any number of other prominent leaders on that side were openly identified as Christians? As a result, the number of Christian civilians killed in inter-communal massacres during the war was far, far lower than the number of Palestinian or Lebanese Muslims killed in that dreadful way.

... So this time, coming back to Beirut, every time I heard the hate-talk coming from so-called "Christians". I was on my guard. I have seen where that kind of talk can lead in Lebanon.

But still, it's necessary to disaggregate my fears about potentially genocidal hate-talk from the fact that lots of people inside Lebanon (and not just the hate-talkers) are strongly opposed to Syria's role inside the country. One is my old friend Walid Jumblatt, hereditary head of the country's Druze community. Walid's father, Kamal Bey Jumblatt, was killed by the Syrians in 1977. In late September this year, Walid's close political ally Marwan Hamadeh was almost killed by a car-bomb near the Beirut corniche that just about everyone in Lebanon thought had been planted by the Syrians.

We spent a great evening with Walid early on in our time in Beirut... I'll write more about that later, probably. But just let me say here that he spoke articulately and with great passion about his opposition both to the Syrian role inside Lebanon and to the US role in Iraq. Unlike many of the other Lebanese who are opposed to Syria's role inside their country-- but who also cheer on the US role in Iraq.

Yes, Lebanon was always a very complicated country, and teasing apart people's different threads of interest and ideology there is always a fine, and ultimately still very imprecise, art.

* * *

Well, that was Lebanon. Now I'm in Syria. Where, guess what, the most commonly heard evaluation of the Syrian role in Lebanon is very different from what you hear in many parts of Beirut,...

Syria's official discourse and apparently many of its people see their country's lengthy presence in Lebanon as playing a stabilizing role there. The Syrians were perhaps the original authors of the argument that, "If we pull out our troops from that othetr country, then only civil war will ensue." In addition, they see resolution 1559 as an unfair attack on them on behalf of the members of the UN Security Council-- and as part of a concerted US campaign to weaken and destabilize Syria from every direction and with whatever means possible. I think what they've been particularly upset about has been France's role in spearheading the push for the resolution. France! Which they had seen as ready to play a counter-US "balancing role" in world affairs, and which had played that role in Lebanon and Syria throughout much of the 1990s... How could France as well as the US so suddenly turn against them?

Actually, I don't think the Syrians have too, too much to worry about in terms of a robust, anti-Syrian movement gaining ground inside Lebanon within the near future. I told you that An-Nahar (which is owned by Marwan Hamadeh's brother-in-law Ghassan Toueini) featured Friday's long-planned anti-Syrian demonstrations very prominently on its front page yesterday... They published a screeching headline and a huge photo of it. But the photo honestly didn't seem to have more than about 1,200 people in it. Hizbullah, a Lebanese party that is an ally of Syria's inside Lebanon, could pull 10 times that number of people onto the streets in less than half an hour if they wanted to. Plus, Hizbullah has a broad and hugely disciplined cadre of experienced fighters backed up by an even larger cadre of very well-organized political operatives.

There is nothing else like Hizbullah's raw, mass-based political power anywhere else in Lebanon. Certainly not on the Christian-extremist side, where factionalism and internecine blood feuds have pulled apart most of the once-feared "Lebanese Forces" coalition.

In addition, several of the experienced Lebanon-watchers with whom I've talked over the past 6 weeks judged that, though intercommunal and anti-Syrian tensions might run high in the country, basically nearly everyone in Lebanon now understands the unbearable costs that civil war imposes on a society, so it would be hard for anyone to mobilize a sufficient number of his neighbors into going down that road again.

I think this is good news. (If true, it means that my worries that the kind of open hate-talk I heard from some "Christian" Lebanon might get the "chance" to be enacted might not, actually, be fulfilled in the near future. It also means that the Syrians' argument that they have to stay in Lebanon to prevent such an outburst has much less force... )

* * *

Anyway, enough for now about Lebanon. What about Syria? I'll write more about that later...

Yet more on Kevin Sites

Kevin has written an open letter to the Marines in the unit he was working with Fallujah. Here is an excerpt:

...We hear gunshots from what seems to be coming from inside the mosque. A Marine from my squad yells, "Are there Marines in here?"

When we arrive at the front entrance, we see that another squad has already entered before us.

The lieutenant asks them, "Are there people inside?"

One of the Marines raises his hand signaling five.

"Did you shoot them," the lieutenant asks?

"Roger that, sir, " the same Marine responds.

"Were they armed?" The Marine just shrugs and we all move inside.

Immediately after going in, I see the same black plastic body bags spread around the mosque. The dead from the day before. But more surprising, I see the same five men that were wounded from Friday as well. It appears that one of them is now dead and three are bleeding to death from new gunshot wounds. The fifth is partially covered by a blanket and is in the same place and condition he was in on Friday, near a column. He has not been shot again. I look closely at both the dead and the wounded. There don't appear to be any weapons anywhere.

"These were the same wounded from yesterday," I say to the lieutenant. He takes a look around and goes outside the mosque with his radio operator to call in the situation to Battalion Forward HQ.

I see an old man in a red kaffiyeh lying against the back wall. Another is face down next to him, his hand on the old man's lap -- as if he were trying to take cover. I squat beside them, inches away and begin to videotape them. Then I notice that the blood coming from the old man's nose is bubbling. A sign he is still breathing. So is the man next to him.

While I continue to tape, a Marine walks up to the other two bodies about fifteen feet away, but also lying against the same back wall.

Then I hear him say this about one of the men:

"He's fucking faking he's dead -- he's faking he's fucking dead."

Through my viewfinder I can see him raise the muzzle of his rifle in the direction of the wounded Iraqi. There are no sudden movements, no reaching or lunging.

However, the Marine could legitimately believe the man poses some kind of danger. Maybe he's going to cover him while another Marine searches for weapons.

Instead, he pulls the trigger. There is a small splatter against the back wall and the man's leg slumps down.

"Well he's dead now," says another Marine in the background.

I am still rolling. I feel the deep pit of my stomach. The Marine then abruptly turns away and strides away, right past the fifth wounded insurgent lying next to a column. He is very much alive and peering from his blanket. He is moving, even trying to talk. But for some reason, it seems he did not pose the same apparent "danger" as the other man -- though he may have been more capable of hiding a weapon or explosive beneath his blanket.

But then two other marines in the room raise their weapons as the man tries to talk.

For a moment, I'm paralyzed still taping with the old man in the foreground. I get up after a beat and tell the Marines again, what I had told the lieutenant -- that this man -- all of these wounded men -- were the same ones from yesterday. That they had been disarmed treated and left here.

At that point the Marine who fired the shot became aware that I was in the room. He came up to me and said, "I didn't know sir-I didn't know." The anger that seemed present just moments before turned to fear and dread.

The wounded man then tries again to talk to me in Arabic.

He says, "Yesterday I was shot... please... yesterday I was shot over there -- and talked to all of you on camera -- I am one of the guys from this whole group. I gave you information. Do you speak Arabic? I want to give you information." (This man has since reportedly been located by the Naval Criminal Investigation Service which is handling the case.)

In the aftermath, the first question that came to mind was why had these wounded men been left in the mosque?

It was answered by staff judge advocate Lieutenant Colonel Bob Miller -- who interviewed the Marines involved following the incident. After being treated for their wounds on Friday by Navy Corpsman (I personally saw their bandages) the insurgents were going to be transported to the rear when time and circumstances allowed.

The area, however, was still hot. And there were American casualties to be moved first.

Also, the squad that entered the mosque on Saturday was different than the one that had led the attack on Friday.

It's reasonable to presume they may not have known that these insurgents had already been engaged and subdued a day earlier.
Yet when this new squad engaged the wounded insurgents on Saturday, perhaps really believing they had been fighting or somehow posed a threat -- those Marines inside knew from their training to check the insurgents for weapons and explosives after disabling them, instead of leaving them where they were and waiting outside the mosque for the squad I was following to arrive.

During the course of these events, there was plenty of mitigating circumstances like the ones just mentioned and which I reported in my story. The Marine who fired the shot had reportedly been shot in the face himself the day before.

I'm also well aware from many years as a war reporter that there have been times, especially in this conflict, when dead and wounded insurgents have been booby-trapped, even supposedly including an incident that happened just a block away from the mosque in which one Marine was killed and five others wounded. Again, a detail that was clearly stated in my television report.

No one, especially someone like me who has lived in a war zone with you, would deny that a solider or Marine could legitimately err on the side of caution under those circumstances. War is about killing your enemy before he kills you.

In the particular circumstance I was reporting, it bothered me that the Marine didn't seem to consider the other insurgents a threat -- the one very obviously moving under the blanket, or even the two next to me that were still breathing.

I can't know what was in the mind of that Marine. He is the only one who does.

But observing all of this as an experienced war reporter who always bore in mind the dark perils of this conflict, even knowing the possibilities of mitigating circumstances -- it appeared to me very plainly that something was not right. According to Lt. Col Bob Miller, the rules of engagement in Falluja required soldiers or Marines to determine hostile intent before using deadly force. I was not watching from a hundred feet away. I was in the same room. Aside from breathing, I did not observe any movement at all.

Making sure you know the basis for my choices after the incident is as important to me as knowing how the incident went down. I did not in any way feel like I had captured some kind of "prize" video. In fact, I was heartsick. Immediately after the mosque incident, I told the unit's commanding officer what had happened. I shared the video with him, and its impact rippled all the way up the chain of command. Marine commanders immediately pledged their cooperation.

We all knew it was a complicated story, and if not handled responsibly, could have the potential to further inflame the volatile region. I offered to hold the tape until they had time to look into incident and begin an investigation -- providing me with information that would fill in some of the blanks.

For those who don't practice journalism as a profession, it may be difficult to understand why we must report stories like this at all -- especially if they seem to be aberrations, and not representative of the behavior or character of an organization as a whole.

The answer is not an easy one.

In war, as in life, there are plenty of opportunities to see the full spectrum of good and evil that people are capable of. As journalists, it is our job is to report both -- though neither may be fully representative of those people on whom we're reporting. For example, acts of selfless heroism are likely to be as unique to a group as the darker deeds. But our coverage of these unique events, combined with the larger perspective - will allow the truth of that situation, in all of its complexities, to begin to emerge. That doesn't make the decision to report events like this one any easier. It has, for me, led to an agonizing struggle -- the proverbial long, dark night of the soul.

I knew NBC would be responsible with the footage. But there were complications. We were part of a video "pool" in Falluja, and that obligated us to share all of our footage with other networks. I had no idea how our other "pool" partners might use the footage. I considered not feeding the tape to the pool -- or even, for a moment, destroying it. But that thought created the same pit in my stomach that witnessing the shooting had. It felt wrong. Hiding this wouldn't make it go away. There were other people in that room. What happened in that mosque would eventually come out. I would be faced with the fact that I had betrayed truth as well as a life supposedly spent in pursuit of it.

When NBC aired the story 48-hours later, we did so in a way that attempted to highlight every possible mitigating issue for that Marine's actions. We wanted viewers to have a very clear understanding of the circumstances surrounding the fighting on that frontline. Many of our colleagues were just as responsible. Other foreign networks made different decisions, and because of that, I have become the conflicted conduit who has brought this to the world.

The Marines have built their proud reputation on fighting for freedoms like the one that allows me to do my job, a job that in some cases may appear to discredit them. But both the leaders and the grunts in the field like you understand that if you lower your standards, if you accept less, than less is what you'll become...

A little closer to Fallujah

Ha! I've got a very expensive connection here at our hotel in Damascus.

Last night we took a really interesting quick tour of the Old City etc by car, then had dinner at a place high up on Jebel Kassioun overlooking the twinkling lights of the city. Our host talked a bit about how anguished most Syrians, especially those in the northeast of the country, feel about the events in Fallujah.

Ilana Ozemoy has a very sobering piece of reporting from Fa