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:
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.
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:
Kuftaro was the Sheikh we went to visit in Damascus last week, as described in the second half of this JWN post.
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:
[Commanders are under an obligation to take positive steps to avoid inflicting harm on noncombatants. Such steps studiously avoided here. ~HC]
(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... ]
For example, when she writes:
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...
''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."
(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.)
Barnard ends with this:
''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."
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.]
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:
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...
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.
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:
All this is gone. It got bombed.
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 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.
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.
I note that the Iraqi Red Crescent was finally able, Thursday, to start delivering some urgently-needed aid inside Fallujah:
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.
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.
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:
* 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.
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??
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,
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.
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!
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,
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.
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.
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:
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."
But since then, other Russian language websites with similar content have appeared, with tasteless jokes about Jewish people and Holocaust denials.
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,
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."
Today, the NYT published a story by Thom Shanker in which he wrote that,
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:
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.
Well, let's start right at the top, then:
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.
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.
He/she/they wrote about the importance of the broad "frames" within which policymakers tend both to view and themselves to frame issues:
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.
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.
That part above was all from either the Introduction, or Ch. 1. In Chapter 2 it gets better:
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.
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....
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.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.
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."
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.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 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?
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.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.
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.
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,
"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."
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.
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.
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...
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 Falluj-ozny in today's US News & World Report...
Rooting out a thousand or so insurgents in Fallujah required American commanders to commit some 10,000 troops, reinforced by punishing air power. The Army's 1st Infantry Division, lacking the number of soldiers necessary to search every house, employed its tanks, blasting heavy cannon rounds in answer to snipers' gun-and mortar fire to minimize time--and U.S. casualties. "You never want to destroy someone's city like this. These people have worked hard for what they have," said Staff Sgt. David Bellavia, of Task Force 2-2's Alpha Company. "But this was the only way to eliminate those fanatics."
... While some houses survived with little damage, whole swaths of the city were made virtually unlivable. On the eastern side of Fallujah, which suffered some of the heaviest fighting, the front of one house looked as if it had been sliced off with a bread knife. The upstairs bedroom remained intact, a small vase of plastic roses sitting undisturbed above a perfectly made bed while the guts of the house spilled into the front yard, burying a man caked with blood and dust.
...with weeks to go before the electricity is turned on and serious reconstruction work begins, Fallujah risks becoming a sequel to the battle for Baghdad--a quick, effective military operation, followed by a slow and problematic reconstruction effort. What Iraqis have seen so far are the images of scorched neighborhoods and wounded civilians looped on Arab satellite TV newscasts, and those who survived the fighting angrily condemned the military tactics. "There was no food, no water, no electricity--just the smell of gunpowder," recalled Muhsan Fuad, 30, who fled his house in Fallujah's Jolan neighborhood a few days after the offensive began, transporting the remains of a cousin killed by mortar fire. "It's a war for freedom and democracy where there is no mercy, no law, no difference between men, women, and children. This is the American way of democracy?"
In about an hour I'll be leaving Beirut to go to Damascus for a few days. Returning here Wednesday. Then next weekend (God, or mainly the Iranian visa authorities, willing) we'll be going to Iran, to a conference on Islam and Democracy in Mashhad.
I'm unclear what the possibilities for posting from Damascus will be. But even if I can't post, I'll try to write some things that I can put up once I get back here Wednesday.
Hey, who knows what transformational lightning might strike on the road to Damascus this time? One of the biggest things that happened to me on it in the past is that, stuck at the border awaiting permission to enter one time in the late 1970s, I read a book that ended up changing my life.
No, it wasn't the Bible. Some day I might tell you that whole story....
The International Committee for the Red Cross, which is the global guarantor and depository for the laws of war, yesterday issued another of its strong statements about the actions of the combatants (including American combatants) in Iraq.
Since the situation is so grave, and the ICRC statement so precise and well-crafted,I'm going to copy the whole text of it into this post. After that, I have a few reflections of my own.
Here's the statement:
For the parties to this conflict, complying with international humanitarian law is an obligation, not an option. There is an absolute prohibition on the killing of persons who are not taking active part in the hostilities, or have ceased to do so. It is also prohibited to torture them or to subject them to any form of inhuman, humiliating or degrading treatment. Furthermore, the parties to the conflict must provide adequate medical care for the wounded – friend or foe – on the battlefield or allow them to be taken elsewhere for treatment. They must do everything possible to help civilians caught up in the fighting obtain the basics of survival such as food, water and health care. The taking of hostages, whether Iraqi or foreign, is forbidden in all circumstances. If these rules or any other applicable rules of international humanitarian law are violated, the persons responsible must be held accountable for their actions.
Regrettably, recent events have again shown just how difficult it has become for neutral, independent and impartial humanitarian organizations to assist and protect the victims of the conflict in Iraq. Once again, the International Committee of the Red Cross appeals for everything possible to be done to allow such organizations to come to the aid of the thousands of Iraqis who are suffering.
And we had dared to hope, back before this century dawned, that it could be an era of development, democratization, and nonviolence?
One thing I note, in reference to these three assaults, is how much the states that have "recognized" nuclear arsenals actually benefit from that status. For it is the five states so endowed-- the US, UK, France, Russia, and China-- that have veto powers on the UN Security Council. So when Russia, say, or the US, conducts a large-scale action that clearly violates the most basic tenets of humanitarianism, the Security Council--a body in which the hopes of most people for the survival of this world are vested-- is actually quite powerless to act...
When Israel launched its assault against Jenin, its close ties with the US gave it some protection from any effective intervention by the Security Council. (I forget whether a US veto was actually cast on that occasion, or merely threatened?) But still, within a couple of weeks of the assault, international pressures had mounted to the point where the IDF was forced to let humanitarian workers into the refugee camp that had been the locus of most of the violence.
As far as I can tell, the US occupation forces in Fallujah have little intention of allowing independent humanitarian agencies into the city, despite its clear obligation to do so under the Geneva Conventions (especially the Fouth GC, which lays out the obligations for any country that's running a military occation of a "foreign" land.)
How handy to be a "recognized" nuclear-weapons state, eh?
What I would like us all to do, starting from this terrible travesty of an international "intervention" that the US launched in Iraq last year, is to start questioning all the pillars of the international "system" that has allowed this train of events to happen. And then, to brainstorm on how the system should be changed, the better to protect the rights and interests of the peoples who are marginalized not just from power but also, it seems, from any effective protection of their existence within the present system.
One first task, given that the policy and media circles in the west have become so exercized about the "threat" that Iran might acquire a nuclear weapon, is to mount a campaign for all states, especially the recognized nuclear-wepons states, to abide by their existing commitments under the landmark Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty that entered into force in 1970.
In Article VI of the NPT, all the signatories (including all the nuclear-weapons states) solemnly undertook,
We could and should have been living in an essentially demilitarized world by now! If, that is, the five nuclear powers who just happen to also rule the world through the use of their Security Council veto had wanted that to happen.
But they didn't. Even the end of the "Cold War", and the effective victory of the NATO powers in that contest, was not used by the victors as an opportunity to start implementing their own solemn obligations under the NPT.
Okay, and beyond disarmament issues, another (linked) pillar of the system that evidently needs reforming is that of the existence of veto powers at the UN.
I know that in Japan and elsewhere there have for a long time been many earnest discussions over how to "reform" the Security Council membership system to give more weight there to powers other than the five present (nuclear-armed) veto-wielders. Most of those suggestions have involved the creation of additional permanent seats on the SC, alongside the five existing permanent members-- but with the additional permanent seats NOT being endowed with a veto.
Personally, though, I think abolishing the veto would be the first thing to do, and then--in the context of much broader reforms of the whole UN system-- changing the way the membership of the SC is composed. The veto is an outrage, and allows each of these five nuclear powers to hold the rest of the world hostage whenever it sees fit.
I really can't see any justification at all for retaining the veto.
Perhaps, back in the past, people used to make arguments that nuclear weapons were so special and so scary that it would be wise to try to contain the destabilizing power that these weapons would give to those who possess them by giving these particular governments a special dose of political power within the UN system? (I seem to recall having read arguments like that back in the past.)
But now, we know that there are at least four states that have "unrecognized" nuclear weapons capabilities-- Israel, India, Pakistan, and most likely also N. Korea. But no-one that I've heard of has proposed "rewarding" those naughty proliferating states by giving each of them a permanent seat and veto power within the Security Council. Why not? One reason is that actually, disproving earlier fears, the acquisition by these states of nuclear weapons has not totally destabilized the intertnational system. That's good. They have, by and large, been fairly responsible in their use of them. Certainly, none of them has yet actually employed a nuclear weapon in a conflict situation.
So that means that any "need to rein them in" argument for giving the recognized NW states a veto on the Security Council has lost its force. In the asbsence of veto powers, would any of the P-5 rush out and starting using its nuclear weapons aggressively? I doubt it. Like the unrecognized NW states, they could be expected to use the nuclear-weapons status for pressure and for all kinds of other political advantages... But guess what? They already do that. So nothing erlse would be new.
So that means that the global community could go right ahead and abolish the iniquity of "veto power" without expecting instant global chaos and nuclear war... Except, oops, I forgot, the veto-wielders would never let that resolution pass, would they?
I guess the rest of us will just have to continue our global campaign on this one...
Anyway, as you can see, I've been doing quite a bit of thinking about the big-picture, international-system types of issues that are raised by this whole dreadful phenomenon of Bushite America running amok in the world. I think it was my dear friend Mike MccGwire, a veteran strategic-affairs analyst who lives in England, who remarked back at the beginning of the present US-Iraq war on how ironic it would turn out to be if the people who ended up saving the integrity of the international system from the ravages wrought upon it by the Bushites turned out to be a coalition of Islamic fundamentalists hunkered down inside the ruined cities of Iraq.
The more that time passes, the more I think he might have been right. But oh, my God, the costs that people--especially the Iraqis--are having to bear along the way!
Retired 3-star Marine General Bernard Trainor is sort of an intellectual's military leader. Well, they like to fawn all over him at Harvard University's prestigious "Kenndy School of Government", where he helps run a security-studies program. Here's his take on whether the US military has in mind any "exit strategy" from Iraq:
... Well, neither do I.
The above quote comes in the latest of the periodic little "interviews" conducted with Trainor by Bernie Gwertzman, a retired national-security correspondent for AP who now works at the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc. He puts them out in a handy little column that the CFR produces and distributes jointly with the NYT.
(Have we mentioned enough "prestigious"-- equals East Coast, old money-- US institutions yet? I'm sure you get the drift.)
Trainor was generally laudatory about what the US fighting men had achieved in Fallujah. Speaking about the Fallujah operation in a notable past tense (!) he said:
BT: I think it has a considerable impact. You have to look at it in two aspects. One is the political aspect. Falluja has become, particularly after the withdrawal [of U.S. forces] in April, the Alamo to the Iraqis--a symbol of resistance to the Americans. That was an inspiration to the nationalists, the Baathists, the Sunnis, and even to the general population of Iraq. Nobody likes to be occupied, and this was sticking a finger in the eye of the Americans. Of course, in the Arab world, everybody was elated by the fact that the Marines backed off, and it was viewed as a great victory for Iraq, the Arab world, and Islam.
In dealing with that, if [Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad] Allawi was going to have a government that was respected and that was viewed as legitimate from a political standpoint, they couldn't allow this autonomous element to continue to exist--something had to be done about that, and to show that the Iraqi government was able to enforce its will. The downside, of course, [looking at] Falluja from a political point of view, is that we get a lot of criticism for destroying a city, killing innocent women and children--the sort of thing Al-Jazeera will focus on--and perhaps increasing recruiting for the resistance.
Now that's the common wisdom. But there's kind of a silver lining in all of this. You will note that there wasn't a widespread outcry in the Arab world. The Arab street was rather muted about this, including Iraqis themselves. The Shiites didn't come up and support the effort, and everybody points out the problems that are taking place in Mosul and Ramadi and other places, but that's restricted to the same gang that caused the problems in Falluja. The general population in Iraq has remained quite quiescent, so I think that's a silver lining here, that the Allawi and American strategy may be working on the political side. It is too early to tell.
Now, on the military side, this place was a viper's nest for the terrorists and the suicide bombers and so forth. From a military standpoint, it had to be taken--not only for its value in the military sense, but also to send a message to the other insurgents and terrorists that we have the strength, if necessary, to go in and take you apart.
BT: I think they have to continue to do this to maintain the momentum, because if they back off, the situation is going to get worse.
BT: We could send more troops out there, but I think the game plan is to hold the line on the numbers that we have and perhaps increase the numbers on the ground by extending the tours of the soldiers that are there and speeding up the deployment of the troops scheduled to go. [This would allow us to] maintain a fair number of forces out there without sending reinforcing units. There's no question that we need more troops out there, but preferably they should be Iraqi troops and not Americans.
Gwertzman asked,
BT: They were made aware of it in various studies. People can point to certain studies and paragraphs which alluded to it, but it really wasn't emphasized by the intelligence community, and even if it was, I don't think it would have registered with the administration at the time. They had a vision of what reality was going to be, that vision is what guided them, and that did not anticipate any sort of insurgency. One of the strong things in their thinking was "we're not going to be doing any nation-building--we'll get in there, do the job, turn it back over to the Iraqis themselves, and get out." That was pretty naive and that was looking at the situation through rose-colored glasses, which any realistic military or civilian planner would say was a fantasy.
Myself, I prefer to stay in the "reality-based community". It seems safer to me. And the most "realistic" strategy of all, when dealing with political differences, is surely to use every alternative to warfare that one can possibly think of rather than heading for the increasingly bloody, inhumane, and quagmire-like tragedy the Bushites' militarism has gotten us all into in Iraq.
It strikes me that pacifism-- that is, a commitment to resolving even serious differences through respectful dialogue and the use only of non-coercive means of persuasion-- has never made more sense than it does today. "Fallujah" seems to me to represent--for both the sides involved in that hellish maelstrom--the ultimate idiocy of using the violent approach.
I'm a bit behind the curve here-- but I found this interesting story about photog Kevin Sites in yesterday's NYT. It quoted Sites as saying that:
I certainly hope all the law enforcement agencies in the US and elsewhere are conducting extensive investigations into who made those terroristic threats, and that those people will be dealt with with all the power of the law.
Kevin does have his own blog. He's a freelancer, working on contract for NBC. The footage from the mosque was, of course, produced as part of a "pool report", which meant that access to all of it had to be equal to all pool members.
His blog has written posts and photos. On Nov. 10th, he was already in (or near) Fallujah. He wrote ,
"Everything to the west is weapons free," radios Staff Sgt. Sam Mortimer of Seattle, Washington. Weapons Free means the marines can shoot whatever they see -- it's all considered hostile.
One jokes they'll be sipping 'Pina Coladas by the Euphrates River by fifteen-hundred.'
... Almost to a man -- the 3.1 Marines I'm embedded with have all lost friends in this protracted war of attrition. They are eager "to get some," to pay "haji" back for the car bombs and IED's (improvised explosive devices) that have killed or maimed so many of their brother "Devil Dogs."
They are extremely likeable -- these young Marines -- full of bravado and easygoing about the danger that surrounds them. Some thumb through Maxim Magazine, others the Bible while the wait patiently to reign down death and destruction on their enemies.
"We're going to let loose the dogs of war," says Staff Sgt. Mortimer, "before the Falluja offensive begins. "It will be hell," he says, smiling after.
The bio page on his blog makes clear that he's an accomplished multi-media journalist with an apparent near-addiction to war coverage (Kosovo, Chiapa, Afghanistan, Iraq, Colombia)... It says:
During a two-year sabbatical, he served as Broadcast Lecturer in the Journalism Department of California Polytechnic State in San Luis Obispo and was named Distinguished Lecturer by the California Faculty Association for the 2000-2001 Academic Year. While there, he initiated a joint research project with Xybernaut Inc. to modify wearable computers for solo digital reporting. [Sounds interesting huh??]
He has worked in local, cable and network news, including ABC's This Week with David Brinkley and NBC's Nightly News with Tom Brokaw. Additionally, he has published numerous articles in newspapers and magazines and was the author of a monthly media column for the New Times alternative weekly. Sites has a Master's Degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
The Eid al-Fitr, which comes at the end of Ramadan, is a much-loved Muslim family feast. Families gather for long visits. The kids get new outfits. Everyone eats a lot and reminisces. Good family time. You know, like Christmas or Easter for Christians, Pesach for Jews. Every religious or national community has such festivals.
It wasn't so much fun for Riverbend's family in Baghdad this year. They had finaly been able to get together, and the television was playing Al-Jazeera when the infamous mosque-shooting tape came on. Here's how River describes it:
"What was I supposed to tell them?" He asked, an hour later, after we had sent his two daughters to help their grandmother in the kitchen. "What am I supposed to tell them- 'Yes darling, they killed him- the Americans killed a wounded man; they are occupying our country, killing people and we are sitting here eating, drinking and watching tv'?" He shook his head, "How much more do they have to see? What is left for them to see?"
And what will happen now? A criminal investigation against a single Marine who did the shooting? Just like what happened with the Abu Ghraib atrocities? A couple of people will be blamed and the whole thing will be buried under the rubble of idiotic military psychologists, defense analysts, Pentagon officials and spokespeople and it will be forgotten. In the end, all anyone will remember is that a single Marine shot and killed a single Iraqi 'insurgent' and it won't matter anymore.
It's typical American technique- every single atrocity is lost and covered up by blaming a specific person and getting it over with. What people don't understand is that the whole military is infested with these psychopaths. In this last year we've seen murderers, torturers and xenophobes running around in tanks and guns. I don't care what does it: I don't care if it's the tension, the fear, the 'enemy'… it's murder. We are occupied by murderers. We're under the same pressure, as Iraqis, except that we weren't trained for this situation, and yet we're all expected to be benevolent and understanding and, above all, grateful. I'm feeling sick, depressed and frightened. I don't know what to say anymore… they aren't humans and they don't deserve any compassion.
So why is the world so obsessed with beheadings? How is this so very different? The difference is that the people who are doing the beheadings are extremists… the people slaughtering Iraqis- torturing in prisons and shooting wounded prisoners- are "American Heroes". Congratulations, you must be so proud of yourselves today.
Well, the best-laid plans can go awry. The resisters/insurgents in Fallujah are still very active in several parts of the city, according to this report on Al-Jazeera.net this morning.
The report quotes Iraqi journalist Fadil al-Badrani, who is still in the city, as saying:
... Badrani said American war planes and tanks had resorted to bombing the holdout sectors of the city and some areas were still not under their control.
"Clashes are still continuing the southern and eastern edges of the town. US forces have so far failed to storm the northern al-Julan neighbourhood," he said.
He added that US-led forces had abandoned al-Julan and the northern parts of the city, resorting shelling and aerial bombing those areas.
So the situation continues to be one of active fighting, with the US employing massively disproportionate violence. (This latter, in large part because of the lack of active US or pro-US "boots on the ground", as per the Rumsfeld doctrine.)
Not that the massive disproportionate violence will "win" the war for the US-- or even, necessarily, win this battle for them. They can Grozny-ize the whole city--and it looks from the pictures as though they've come close to achioeving that already.
But has Grozny-ization worked in Chechnya, in terms of forcing the Cherchens into submitting to Moscow's will? No. Don't expect it to work in Fallujah either.
So we can expect more, grindingly more, of the same. With the banner of "democratization" pounded into the shattered ruins there. It doesn't matter what the banner is called, the effects on human lives are exactly the same.
As for the Sharm al-Shaikh conference? Who on earth knows how that will turn out... Or the Iraqi "elections" either, come to that. (Note: they've had at least two rounds of "elections" in Chechnya since the fighting there started. Neither of them resolved the problems, and the last round was notably anti-democratic.)
Margaret, I never met you. I wish we'd had the chance to meet...
Hassan was born Margaret Fitzsimmons in Ireland, where her early childhood was spent in a Dublin suburb. Later, her family moved to London, where she completed her education.
In 1961, when she was 17, she met and married Iraqi-born Tahseen Ali Hassan, who was 26 years old and studying engineering in the UK. In 1972, she moved with her new husband to Iraq, where she began working for the British Council, teaching English to Iraqis. Falling in love with the country, she learnt Arabic, converted to Islam and became an Iraqi citizen.
It was dangerous for you, too... for all these past 24 years, ever since Saddam launched the first of his two crazy wars of aggrandisement and aggression.
How were those wars for you, Margaret? They must have been so painful. Eight years long the first one, 1980-88. Quicker, the second one... but then it was followed by the 12 years of pauperizing sanctions.
How were all those years for you, Margaret? I would have asked you... Perhaps pulled out my little minidisk recorder so we could talk more broadly, without me having to take notes at the same time.
In 1990, Saddam invaded Kuwait. Operation Desert Storm, the first Gulf war, was launched by an international coalition headed by the Americans the following year. Again, despite the 42-day bombing campaign, Hassan never left Iraq. During the war the British Council suspended its work. At the conflict's end, Hassan was left jobless.
"Withstood", yes... But not without suffering almost unbelievable spiritual wounding from all that had happened. What other explanation is there for the way they treated you, dear Margaret... Margaret, their friend??
Okay, I know it was not all "the Iraqi people" who did that to you. Just as it is not all "the American people", or all "the British people" who have been carrying out the violent and abusive actions that have been the main order of the day inside Iraq for the past 20 months.
In each of those cases, it is just a wounded but powerful minority who commit the atrocities. But each of those atrocities: your killing, every single one of the killings that is taking place inside Iraq these days-- they all wound all the rest of us as well.
However, Hassan did appear in three harrowing videos. The most recent footage - released on November 2 - was so distressing that al-Jazeera, the Arabic television station, refused to screen much of it on humanitarian grounds.
I never met you. I wish we'd had the chance to meet.
But we didn't. Now I'll just have to figure out what I can do, in my way, to continue the work that you started. Loving condolences to your husband, you siblings, and all those who not only loved you but also knew you well.
So you thought US foreign policy in Bush's first term was as bad as it could get??
Ha-ha-ha. Does Unca Dick Cheney have some surprises in store for you.
Those talented and straight-talking Knight-Ridder journos Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay wrote yesterday that:
Powell and his State Department team - quietly backed by the intelligence community - argued often for a foreign policy that was more inclusive of allies and that relied on diplomacy and coercion rather than on force to deal with adversaries.
Bombs-Away Don will be staying on, meanwhile, and of course Condi's heading over to State. S & L have this great quote from the Brookings Institution's Ivo Daalder... (read on)
She used to be Jesse Helms's chief foreign-policy aide. At a time in his career, of course, when he was virulently pro-Likud, as opposed to the earlier ophase when he was virulently anti-Semitic.
Here in the Middle East, jaws have dropped on hearing of the possibility of her appointment. In Lebanon she's known as "Mrs. Legs", because of her habit of wearing extremely short mini-skirts to official meetings.
Not at all an appropriate thing to do in Arab or Muslim countries.
Lebanon is one thing. But one person here recalled seeing her wear similarly revealing clothing while walking around Gaza, a place marked by much more social conservatism in matters of dress. Then, when some Gaza men started staring at her, apparently unable to believe their eyes, she harangued them loudly.
This is not trivial, but it's just one sign of the determinedly "in yer face" attitude she takes to Muslims and Arabs on the whole range of issues. Especially, of course, Israeli-Palestinian issues and questions about war and peace in Iraq. Let's hope someone comes up with a better alternative for this job than Pletka.
I want to write three things in this post:
(More on Sites' testimony, below)
(2) A strong concern: After the very damaging battles Israel waged against the Jenin refugee camp, in spring 2002, the main concern of the Israeli authorities was to prevent for as long as possible any entry into the camp by anyone who could classify as an independent observer of the carnage within.
Bassically, they want to be able to "clean up" as many of the signs of carnage within the battle-zone as possible before such observers got any chance to see it. (Also, who knows? Maybe to plant a few bits of apparently incriminating "evidence" here and there.)
Those kept out of Jenin camp-- for some 12 agonizing days after the end of the battle there, as I recall-- included press people, residents of the camp who, earlier having fled their homes, were desperate to return to them and to their loved ones left behind--
Plus, crucially, it included all local and international humanitarian aid organizations. That delay prevented the provision of adequate lifesaving services to the people still inside the camp and caused additional deaths and suffering.
I am extremely worried that, having played by "Jenin rules" for so long during the war in Iraq, the US authorities will also try to apply "Jenin rules" on this question of humanitarian access to Fallujah, too.
(Update: This Al-Jazeera report seems to indicate that "Jenin rules" are already in operation. In it, Asma Khamis al-Muhannadi, an assistant doctor who witnessed the US and Iraqi National Guard assault on Falluja hospital, is reported as saying that, "the medical staff received threats from the interim Iraqi health minister who said if anyone disclosed information about the raid, they would be arrested or dismissed from their jobs." Read the rest of her chilling report there, too.)
(3) A suggestion: This issue of humanitarian access to Fallujah (and all other Iraqi cities that the US forces are now "bombing in order to save them") is one that concerned people around the world--and especially inside the US-- should focus activities on. It is a way that, if we can bring enough pressure to bear, we can actually hope to save lives.
I realize that "humanitarian access now!" may not be a very snappy slogan. But something like: "Fallujah! Let the Red Cross in!" could work well.
JWN commenter "Susan in NC" helpfully gave us the "comment line" numbers for the White House: (202) 456-1112 and (202) 456-1111. Call up and leave your message there. Write to your Congress-person and Senators. Get out on the streets in peace demonstrations. Write to local and national media.
Focusing on this point (and on the broader point of the need to abide by the laws of war) is, I think, really important right now. At the same time, "Bring the toops home" or "Support the troops-- bring them home" is still the best larger theme.
(This is from the site linked to above.)
The Marine battalion stormed an unidentified mosque Saturday in southern Fallujah after taking casualties from heavy sniper fire and attacks with rocket-propelled grenades. Ten insurgents were killed and five others were wounded in the mosque and an adjacent building.
The Marines displayed a cache of rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47 assault rifles that they said the men were holding. They said the arms were conclusive evidence that insurgents had been using mosques as fighting positions in Fallujah, which they said made the use of force appropriate.
When the Marines left to advance farther south, the five wounded Iraqis, none of whose injuries appeared to be life-threatening, were left behind in the mosque for other Marines to evacuate for treatment.
Saturday, however, reports surfaced that mosques in the region had been reoccupied, including the mosque the Marine battalion had stormed the day before.
Two units that were not involved in Friday’s fighting advanced on the mosque, one moving around the back and the second, accompanied by Sites, from the front. Sites said he could hear gunfire from inside.
Sites was present when a lieutenant from one of the units asked a Marine what had happened inside the mosque. The Marine replied that there were people inside.
“Did you shoot them?” the lieutenant asked.
“Roger that, sir,” the second Marine replied.
“Were they armed?” the lieutenant asked.
The second Marine shrugged in reply.
Sites saw the five wounded men left behind on Friday still in the mosque. Four of them had been shot again, apparently by members of the squad that entered the mosque moments earlier. One appeared to be dead, and the three others were severely wounded. The fifth man was lying under a blanket, apparently not having been shot a second time.
One of the Marines noticed that one of the severely wounded men was still breathing. He did not appear to be armed, Sites said.
The Marine could be heard insisting: “He’s f---ing faking he’s dead — he’s faking he’s f---ing dead.” Sites then watched as the Marine raised his rifle and fired into the man’s head from point-blank range.
“Well, he’s dead now,” another Marine said.
When told that the man he shot was a wounded prisoner, the Marine, who himself had been shot in the face the day before but had already returned to duty, told Sites: “I didn’t know, sir. I didn’t know.”
The timing of the account seems a little internally inconsistent. Sites' description of, apparently, the first time the battalion stormed the mosque was that it was on "Saturday", but later it seems more likely that it was on Friday... Maybe late-night Friday / early-morning Sat?
Anyway, that was when they left five wounded insurgents behind them inside the mosque, with no record that any first-aid had been offered to them. A violation of the Geneva Conventions. (Or, two violations.)
The marines also "displayed" the arms they'd found in the mosque at the time, which meant that the arms were in the Marines' hands, not those of the insurgents. Almost certainly, the wounded insurgents were disarmed at that time. They were also apparently immobile, since they were simply "left behind in the mosque for other Marines to evacuate for treatment".
No such evacuation occurred, however. (Did the attacking squad call in to the medics to make such an evacuation? That wd be crucial evidence of their intent.)
On Saturday, two units that "were not involved in Friday’s fighting" returned to the mosque, approaching it from two different sides. Sites was, obviously, traveling with only one of the two units and apparently could not see what the other unit was doing. He said he could hear gunfire from inside. He heard a Marine confirm that he had shot the people inside the mosque:
“Roger that, sir,” the second Marine replied.
“Were they armed?” the lieutenant asked.
The second Marine shrugged in reply.
When Sites entered the mosque, he saw the five people he'd seen left there the day before, and four of them "had been shot again, apparently by members of the squad that entered the mosque moments earlier." He didn't report seeing any other Iraqis in the mosque (such as might have been armed and shot at the squad that entered.)
In other words, four of the five wounded insurgents who'd been left there the day before, presumably already disarmed, immobile, and "awaiting medical evacuation", had been summarily shot.
Four massive violations of the GC's.
And then, Sites saw one Marine shoot one of the wounded men in cold blood. (Which is what we saw on the t.v. clip.)
Another violation of the GC's. Possibly, the seventh such violation that Sites had talked about in his testimony so far.
Someone--presumably Sites-- then told the shooter that his victim had been a wounded prisoner, and the Marine told Sites: “I didn’t know, sir. I didn’t know.”
So, huge numbers of violations there need to be investigated, and it seems clear it is not only the one shooter whom Sites had caught on tape whose actions should be investigated.
I want to express a massive thank-you to Kevin Sites for having stuck closely to journalistic and humanitarian ethics in this whole incident. I am sure that, for journalists who are embedded with fighting formations in circumstances that for all of them are very scary, there is a huge temptation to ignore or downplay the "excesses" that the embedded-in units might commit "in the heat of battle". Sites resisted that temptation.
In addition, he knew enough about the distinctions contained in the Geneva Conventions that he could clearly recognize that the wounded insurgents did indeed qualify as wounded POWs (since they had previously been disarmed by the US forces, and the original capturing unit had asserted the US forces' responsibility for them by promising a medical evacuation for them), and therefore that shooting them was an act for which the shooter should be reproached. Indeed, shooting them was a clear war crime.
So, Kevin: big thanks to you.
And the rest of us: let's figure out what we can do to get humanitarian access into Fallujah and the other beleaguered cities absolutely as soon as possible.
US military commanders in Iraq have identified a major new threat-- Iraqi hospitals!
That seems the only conclusion to be drawn from this piece of spine-chilling reporting from the NYT's Eric Schmitt:
The offensive also shut down what officers said was a propaganda weapon for the militants: Falluja General Hospital, with its stream of reports of civilian casualties.
Not only (see previous post) has the US made a positive decision not to count Iraqi civilian casualties. But now, any independent institution that issues casualty reports is judged to be "a propaganda weapon for the militants" and on that basis is to be shut down.
Watch out, the people who run the excellent British medical journal, The Lancet! There might be a Tomahawk missile heading your way any day now!
There is a difference, of course, between The Lancet and Fallujah General Hospital. Fallujah hospital was actually, until it was shut down, providing urgently needed medical services to a beleaguered population. Shutting it down in a situation of anything less than immediate military necessity--if there had been snipers on its roof, for example--is therefore clearly a major violation of the laws of war.
No such argument of "military necessity" has yet been made. All we have is the claim that the hospital was a "propaganda weapon in the hands of the militants."
This is so sick, so unbelievably tragic. How can US commanders make these outrageous arguments and believe that the people who hear them will simply nod sagely and say, "Oh yes, that makes good sense"??
Also, why should anyone take seriously their claim that the Iraqi civilian casualties in Fallujah were "lower than expected", since they also clearly admit that they don't "do" casualty counts.
I wonder, at the military briefing from which those quotes were taken, where the follow-up questions from the press were:
"Okay, so how many Iraqi civilian casualties have there been?" " How many were you expecting?" " Was it valid to go ahead and launch the offensive even if you were expecting that high a number of casualties?" " Tell us what is actually being done to help the wounded among the Iraqi civilians?"
No, none of those questions appear to have been asked. The media people involved just went along for the ride. Virtually oblivious to the moral consequences of what they were writing about-- not to mention, to the quite predictable fallout of the anti-humanitarian nature of US actions on the politics inside Iraq.
It's as if they don't even really see Iraqis as fully human, subject to normal human motivations and the natural human desire for personal dignity... But perhaps doing that would be a dangerous exercize.
Andrew Mack, former director of Kofi Annan's strategic planning unit, has a very important and carefully argued piece in the Japan Times today. He focuses on the issue of the gross disproportionality between the numbers of deaths of US combatants in Iraq and those that the US military has inflicted upon Iraqi civilians.
A (dis-)proportion of 100:1, that is.
His conclusion:
In the West there is justifiable outrage at the barbarous beheadings of foreigners in Iraq, but relatively little concern about the tens of thousands of ordinary Iraqis whose deaths are the inevitable consequence of a U.S. strategy designed to reduce U.S. casualties.
So, actually, is the issue of the "probability of success". I.e., just war theorists recognize that since war is itself massively harmful, you don't want to have it drag on and be "unsuccessful".
I guess the Bushies just didn't read their St. Augustine before they launched this war?
Proportionality of military action, and in particular the need to take positive action to avoid the infliction of harm on civilians, is also an important principle in the international laws of war.
I went to the website of the ICRC, the body internationally charged with interpreting and guarding the integrity of the international laws of war, and I punched "proportionality" into their internal search. It came up with this lengthy list of materials.
One of them was this appeal, issued Nov 9, dealing explicitly with the situation in Iraq. It starts:
It calls upon all fighters to take every feasible precaution to spare civilians and civilian property and to respect the principles of distinction and proportionality in all military operations.
["Distinction" = the positive obligation to distinguish between combatants and civilians and to take active steps to avoid damage to the latter. Where such a distinction cannot be clearly made, commanders are obliged to assume that the individuals concerned are civilians until the opposite has been proved.]
Andrew Mack, in the article cited above, builds on the results of the recent Lancet survey. He notes that the authors of that survey already recognized that Fallujah was such an extreme "outlier" in terms of the casualty totals inflicted there, that they had excluded the Fallujah figures from their global estimate of the death toll. He writes,
... It is important to note that the huge death toll is not due simply to the war -- most violent deaths have occurred since the United States declared victory in April 2003.
The survey also shows that 84 percent of the violent deaths were caused not by rebels, but by coalition forces. And most of these deaths weren't caused by soldiers fighting on the ground, but by long-range air and artillery strikes. Women and children together made up more than half of the violent deaths, with 38 percent of the total being children.
No matter how precise the weapons and accurate the targeting, using long-range ordinance against densely populated residential urban areas will always cause massive civilian casualties.
The body-count consequences of fighting this way are instructive. For every 100 dead Iraqis (most of them civilians), just one U.S. combatant has been killed. (More than 900 U.S. service personnel have died in action since the fighting started with more killed in accidents.) A 100:1 "kill ratio" is extraordinarily high.
When Israel attacked a Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin in 2002, there was a storm of protest at the civilian casualties (estimated at 56). But the Israelis didn't attempt to strike at their enemies remotely, they went into harm's way on foot. Twenty-three Israeli soldiers lost their lives. Here the kill ratio was under 3:1 in Israel's favor. Deaths in the Israel-Palestine conflict receive huge publicity around the world despite the fact that the death toll for both Palestinians and Israelis is tiny compared with that in Iraq -- less than 2 percent of the total.
Had the U.S. fought in Iraq the way that Israel fought in Jenin and suffered a comparable casualty ratio, more than 40,000 U.S. service members would have been shipped home in coffins by now.
Mack speculates as to why that is:
The head of Statistics Department in the Iraqi Health Ministry reported last December that the Coalition Provisional Authority didn't want civilian casualty statistics to be collected. As U.S. Gen. Tommy Franks, who led the invasion, put it: "We don't do body counts."
The huge, but mostly unreported, Iraqi civilian death toll and the central U.S. role in creating it helps explain why Washington is losing the hearts and minds battle in Iraq and just why there is so much Iraqi rage about the occupation.
Here are two good pieces of reporting by Dahr Jamail:
This is the latest post (Nov 12) on his blog. In it he describes driving round Baghdad with his driver/friend/interpeter Abu Talat...
He told me that during the buildup to the siege of Fallujah, he had sent John Negroponte, the current so-called ambassador of Iraq, a letter which, along with several other points, asked him, “Do you think that by occupying Fallujah you will stop the resistance?”
Of course his letter was ignored, and now we watch in fear as the resistance is spreading across Iraq like a wildfire, fanned by the pounding of Fallujah.
Dr. Nathmi ... asked what the difference was between what is occurring in Fallujah now to what Saddam Hussein did during his repression of the Shia Intifada which followed the ’91 Gulf War. “Saddam suppressed that uprising and used less awful methods than the Americans are in Fallujah today.”
They also demonstrated to show that they were unafraid of the US military.
And they called for jihad against Allawi.
Muna Salim’s sister, Artica, was seven months’ pregnant when two rockets from US warplanes struck her home in Fallujah on November 1. “My sister Selma and I only survived because we were staying at our neighbours’ house that night,” Muna continued, unable to reconcile her survival while eight members of her family perished during the pre-assault bombing of Fallujah that had dragged on for weeks.
Khalid, one of their brothers who was also killed in the attack, has left behind a wife and five young children.
“There were no fighters in our area, so I don’t know why they bombed our home,” said Muna. “When it began there were full assaults from the air and tanks attacking the city, so we left from the eastern side of Fallujah and came to Baghdad.”
...
Both sisters described a nightmarish existence inside the city where fighters controlled many areas, food and medicine were often in short supply, and the thumping concussions of US bombs had become a daily reality.
Water also was often in short supply, and electricity a rarity. Like many families cowered down inside Fallujah they ran a small generator when they could afford the fuel.
“Even when the bombs were far away, glasses would fall off our shelves and break,” said Muna. “None of us could sleep as during the night it was worse.”
While going to the market in the middle of the day to find food, the sisters said they felt terrorised by US warplanes, which often roared over the sprawling city. “The jets flew over so much,” said Selma, “but we never knew when they would strike the city.”
The women described a scene of closed shops, mostly empty streets, and terrorised residents wandering around the city not knowing what to do.
“Fallujah was like a ghost town most of the time,” described Muna. “Most families stayed inside their houses all the time, only going out for food when they had to.”
Tanks often attacked the outskirts of the city in skirmishes with resistance fighters, adding to the chaos and unrest. Attack helicopters rattling low over the desert were especially terrifying, criss-crossing over the city and firing rockets into the centre.
While recounting their family’s traumatic experiences over the last few weeks, from their uncle’s home in Baghdad, each of the sisters often paused, staring at the ground as if lost in the images before adding more detail. [Or, as if traumatized by the memories?? ~HC] Their 65-year-old mother, Hadima, was killed in the bombing, as was their brother Khalid, who was an Iraqi police captain. Their sister Ka’ahla and her 22-year-old son also died.
“Our situation was like so many in Fallujah,” said Selma, continuing, her voice now almost emotionless and matter of fact. The months of living in terror are etched on her face.
“So many people could not leave because they had nowhere to go, and no money.”
Adhra’a, another of their sisters, and Samr, Artica’s husband, were also among the victims. Samr had a PhD in religious studies. Artica and Samr had a four-year-old son, Amorad, who died with his parents and his unborn brother or sister.
The two sisters managed to flee the city from the eastern side, carefully making their way through the US military cordon which, for the most part, encircled the area. As they left, they witnessed a scene that was full assaults on their city from US warplanes and tanks .
“Why was our family bombed?” pleaded Muna, tears streaming down her cheeks, “There were never any fighters in our area.”
God save them all.
The war against Fallujah is putting a lot of strain on the US forces inside Iraq. But at the same time, the bullying nature of the ideologically driven political appointees whom Bush and Co. have put in charge of national security decisionmaking has been putting a lot of strain on the seasoned professionals within the relevant government agencies.
Is Washington's national-security decisionmaking apparatus cracking under the strain?
Yesterday the WaPo reported that Robert Blackwill, the administration's previous Chief Minister for Iraq, had phsyically jostled or assaulted a female State Department employee in Kuwait, shortly before his very hasty (and probably related) resignation from his post.
But today we have even more startling news, from the WaPo's Dana Priest and Walter Pincus, namely that the CIA's top "regular cadre" employee, John McLaughlin, resigned yesterday.
He did so, they write,
The WaPo story continues that McLaughlin:
Yesterday, the agency official who oversees foreign operations, Deputy Director of Operations Stephen R. Kappes, tendered his resignation after a confrontation with Murray. Goss and the White House pleaded with Kappes to reconsider and he agreed to delay his decision until Monday, the officials said.
Several other senior clandestine service officers are threatening to leave, current and former agency officials said...
I for one don't feel more secure after reading this news.
Go read the rest of the article.
As part of the Bush/Allawist campaign to subdue Iraq's cities, the US military has been turning off the water to many of them. You can imagine what this means for civilian families, hospitals, etc.
It is also a clear breach of the 2nd Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions, which deals with precisely the issue of what is permitted and what not permitted during situations of siege and assault on cities.
Dan O'Huiginn and his colleagues from Cambridge Solidarity with Iraq* have pulled together a very useful briefing paper on this issue. It's written from a UK perspective-- drawing together the info on the denial-of-water issue for British MPs and urging them to act on it. I am sure that it could easily be edited to form an appeal to legislators and authorities in other countries.
Especially the US!
I note parenthetically that while many in the US political establishment argue strongly for respect of the provisions of international humanitarian law that apply to the treatment of prisoners-of-war, or wounded combatants, they generally seem less enthusiastic about arguing for the provisions that are designed to protect civilians living under foreign military occupation.
I'm wondering whether this is because, while there is an implied "reciprocity" in all the Geneva Conventions and annexes, it might be harder for Americans to imagine that their (our) homeland might ever come under foreign military occupation than it is to imagine that US soldiers might be taken prisoner in hostilities?
This failure of imagination notwithstanding, it seems evident to me that basic human ethics, as well as the provisions of international humanitarian law, should be a powerful argument for trying to separate civilians as much as possible from the horrors of war.
Also, as Dan and Co. argue in their briefing paper, it only makes good political sense in the Iraqi context for the US/Allawists to try to treat Iraqi civilians decently...
---
*Sorry I got the full name of CASI wrong in an earlier post.
Some thoughts from Beirut about the post-Arafat period (RIP):
(1) We've been having amazing, wall-to-wall coverage of the Arafat events on the BBC's Middle East feed. Riveting stuff, and very well anchored from Ramallah by Lyse Doucet. I can't imagine anyone in US television who could do half as good a job: well-informed, balanced, capable, great stamina...
The vignette that really caught my eye happened at around 3 this afternoon, local time, after the helicopters bringing YA's mortal remains and the entourage back to Ramallah landed in the teeming-full Muqataa. The waiting Palestinians--nearly all of whom in that place were male-- all surged forward and surrounded the choppers. Saeb Eraqat, the shaved-head, rather self-important guy who's been in charge of "Negotiations Policy" for a while, tried with some colleagues to let down the chopper door that has the stairway in it so they could all get out. The crowd would not move back to let the stairway down.
He stood there for some 20-30 minutes making big gestures and evidently loud appeals to people to back off... But no-one responded to him, at all. All the PA humpty-humps were kept virtual prisoners in the chopper for all that time.
(2) I wonder if that signifies something bigger? I know that many Palestinians, inside and outside the homeland, lost patience with the "negotiation" team a long time ago. Also, with the "negotiations"...
So many talking heads-- people, I should add, who often know diddly-squat about Palestinian politics-- have been saying things like, "Well, after the death of Arafat there's a window of opportunity, and a new generation of more moderate leaders can come forward..."
Boy, that's a tired old tune. We certainly heard it back in 2000 when Hafez al-Asad died.... That his son Bashar, the present Preisdent, was a "new generation" guy, which in the eyes of many westerners equates with being either extremely pro-western or completelyt warm and fuzzy on negotiations and ready to give away the store in them...
They were wrong about Bashar, and I dare say they will most likely be wrong about whoever it is that-- eventually--takes over from Arafat.
Hafze al-Asad, remember, had the historic stature and internal legitimacy to be (relatively, from the Syrian viewpoint) flexible on many aspects of the negotiations with Israel. Arafat, ditto. But their successors? No...
So in the post-Arafat phase, too, I'm not expecting the successors to be any more flexible on the negotiations than the Old Man was.
Plus, in the Palestinian context, you have the additional factor, unlike in Syria, that waiting in the wings and exerting considerable political influence is a well-organized, well-respected Islamic movement that will certainly be keeping the heat up in the post-Arafat phase.
So people should take all those pronunciamentos about the "flexible new generation" or the post-Arafat "window of opportunity" with a whole bushel of salt.
(3) In fact, those pronunciamentos would only have any validity if you had, in the first place, bought in to the whole Sharonist argument that "the issue was Arafat," That is, that it was only that stubborn old man who was standing in the way of the most amazing progress in the peace negotiations.
No. The issue wasn't Arafat (though he himself usually liked to think it was, and he thus colluded in Sharon's argument.) The issue was--and remains-- the issue: That is, the very complex collection of claims and counter-claims in the negotiations that have never been satisfactorily resolved or, in some cases, even adequately discussed... Like the Palestinian refugees' claims; like the all-important territorial question; like Jerusalem; like the need for the Palestinian state to have full sovereign powers including over its own borders and natural-resource base...
Those issues remain. Arafat dying hasn't made a bit of difference in them.
(4) Then later in the afternoon I watched the Blair/Bush press conference. Their big argument, articulated more clearly there than previously though it's been mentioned previously, was that the Palestinians have to have a full democracy before they can be "given" an independent state.
How's that again? Where, in any canon of international law, does it say that before colonized or occupied nations can get their independence they have to be fully democratic?
(It doesn't.)
Also, how on earth are the Palestinians supposed to develop all the institutions and practices of democracy while they are under hostile military occupation-- occupation, moreover, by a power that has ongoing designs on their land base and that for four years now has kept the occupied people trapped by tight movement controls that allow none of the freedom of movement that's a basic prerequisite of any democratic activity...
It strikes me that Bush and Blair are imposing this new, quite unrealizable standard on the Palestinians in order further to delay their march toward independence. (And Bush virtually admitted as much when he replied to a clear question about "Do you have as a goal the establishment of a Palestinian state during your four-year term of office" with bluster, hemming and hawing, and no clear answer.)
Well, it's tragic days all round. I won't even, here, get into the whole issue about what we could expect if, indeed, the Palestinians are allowed to express themselves freely and elect a fully accountable national leadership... Given the immense frustrations and anger from the whole Oslo years, you could certainly expect that any leadership elected now would be far firmer in the negotiations than Arafat ever was...
No, I don't expect they would be "totally intransigent". Not even the Islamists--who have shown their capacity for pragmatism on numerous occasions. But one thing they wouldn't do is allow themselves to get snookered into one of those endless negotiating-about-meaningless-details processes like the one that flowed from Oslo.
But of course, all that's on offer now, negotiation-wise-- the Road Map-- is almost exactly like that. Crucially, it shares with Oslo the feature that it has no firm and defined destination.
Would you care to take a road trip (in a car driven by a power-crazed madman like Ariel Sharon) on such a basis?
No? Well, neither would I. But that is, it seems what Bush and Blair are asking the Palestinians to do.
Like I said, tragic.
Here's how my Arafat obit-column in today's CSM came out.
We awoke today to the BBC presenting breaking news of Arafat's death. I now have to crash-edit an obit-style column on him that I drafted ten days ago. It's more an evaluation of him as a person/leader than a piece about the politics: what comes next, etc.
Tough piece to write because I feel so much of the disappointment, anger, etc towards him that many of my Palestinian friends (and some Israeli friends) feel... (See this JWN post.)
And yet he did play an important role, historically. That is undeniable. Plus, it's not appropriate to speak too harshly of the recently departed.
I reckon that some similarly complex mixture of feelings and assessments may explain why the reaction to the news of his failing over the past couple of weeks, coming from Palestinians inside and outside the homeland, has been notably muted. That, and the very unseemly public set-to between Suha and the old guys.
Oh yes, and let's not forget that the Palestinian "leadership" still doesn't have any real strategy for success beyond the essentially defensive strategy of avoiding internal breakdown. Though avoiding that is extremely important, I know.
Best of luck to them all.
Gotta go.
Update 11 a.m. Beirut/Ramallah time:
Was just watching Al-Jazeera. Saw Salim al-Zaanoun announcing that Abu Mazen's been named head of the PLO Executive Committee. At the same time a crawl at the bottom saying that Fateh's Central Committee has named Farouq Qaddumi as its head. Interesting.
Then, over to the BBC: reporters on the streets of Ramallah where a quiet though fairly sparse-looking group of Palestinians had started to gather. This seems like interesting evidence of the remoteness of the old guys inside the Muqataa from the actual Palestinian people all around them... That they didn't even have people outside the Muqataa organizing anything?
Reportedly, more activity in the Ain al-Helwa refugee camp in south Lebanon, which has long been a hotbed for a fairly radical form of pro-Fateh activism.
With all the continuing, terrible news about Iraq it was good to hear of one small but significant achievement for the global human rights movement.
Namely, Monday's decision by Judge James Robertson of the US Federal Court in Washington DC, in the case of long-time Gitmo detainee Salim Ahmed Hamdan, inwhich he judged that:
* The combatant status review tribunal (established by the Pentagon after the Supreme Court’s ruling against the administration last summer) is not a competent tribunal for determining Hamdan’s prisoner-of-war (POW) status under the Geneva Conventions;
* Unless and until a competent tribunal determines that Hamdan is not a POW, he is entitled to be tried under the same justice system that U.S. soldiers are afforded;
* Even if Hamdan is not a POW he may not be tried before any military commission until the rules are amended so as to be consistent with the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) – the federal laws governing trials for U.S. soldiers; and
* Hamdan must not be held indefinitely in solitary confinement and should be returned to the rest of the detainee population.
The Bushies' had argued that "terrorism" was something so new, so tricky, and so heinous that the "old-fashioned" rules of the Geneva Conventions couldn't possibly be said to apply to people accused of having committed it.
"Not so fast," said Judge Robertson (in effect).
I don't have Robertson's decision in front of me. What I do have is a great piece of reporting by Avi Cover of Human Rights First, who has been down in Gitmo "covering" the resumption of the "Combatant Status Review Tribunals" set up there by the administration as a way of skirting its responsibilities under the Geneva Conventions...
One point Cover focused on from Robertson's ruling was this succinct statement: "The President is not a tribunal."
In other words, just the fact that the Prez determined that Hamdan and all the other number of illegally held detainees did not have any right to Geneva Convention protections did not make it so.
Amen to that, I say.
Anyway, Cover's reporting is really quite exciting. He and a few other NGO reps were down there observing the Gitmo Status Review Tribunals on Monday, actually listening to the Presiding Officer there go into some arcane point of law. When suddenly, this happened:
Then Lt. Cmdr. Swift [Hamdan's appointed military attorney in that proceeding]got up to argue that the commission as presently constituted with only three panel members and no alternates was in violation of the military commission order... Swift asked that the commission certify the issue for the Appointing Authority to decide.
It was in the next moment that the proceedings – which were just beginning to seem routine – became anything but. A soldier handed Presiding Officer Brownback a note. After reading it Brownback then stated blandly: “We are going to take an indefinite recess.” The three members exited the room quickly while everyone else was left looking quizzically at one another wondering, “What’s going on?” Then the word rippled through the room, “the federal court stopped the commissions... the federal court stopped the commissions!”
Ironically, the lawyers, we NGO representatives, and the press stuck here in Guantanamo – all under the constraints of security with limited access to any computer – felt as though we were the last to read the federal court’s actual decision. Although Hamdan’s case had been before the military commission, Hamdan’s lawyers had also challenged his detention in a separate case in federal court and attacked the commission’s legality from outside. After the commissions recessed, we were driven to the press building (about 5 minutes drive from the courtroom) and after a time given Judge James Robertson’s 45-page decision. Judge Robertson’s order and decision granted Hamdan’s request in part, most significantly stopping the military commissions.
In addition, Judge Robertson’s decision is also a clear statement that the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) do not reach the level of a competent tribunal as envisioned by Article 5 of the Geneva Conventions and the military’s own regulations...
As Judge Robertson states succinctly: “The President is not a tribunal.” In other words, it’s not for the President to determine as a general matter than neither Hamdan nor any vast category of detainees can be deprived of Geneva Convention protections; that determination can only be made on a case-by-case basis, by a tribunal set up to hear the facts, and apply the law. Indeed, military regulations are structured so as to implement Article 5 of the Geneva Conventions, setting forth clear procedures for determining the status of a detainee. The CSRTs, in contrast, ask only whether a detainee is an enemy combatant or not (a term with no clear meaning under the Geneva Conventions) – and they come only now, thousands of miles and years removed from the facts of capture on the ground.
The court further made clear that even if Hamdan is found not to be a POW, he still cannot be tried before the military commission as presently constituted. Judge Robertson found that the military commissions were fatally flawed because they were “contrary to or inconsistent” with the procedures in the UCMJ. In particular, the military commission allowed for great amounts of evidence to be kept from Hamdan and all other defendants, under the vague and broad term “protected information.” The UCMJ does provide for the creation of military commissions, but not commissions, like those underway at Guantanamo, that so deviate from the basic fairness rules of the UCMJ.
Finally – and perhaps most important – Judge Robertson recognized the importance of ensuring that Hamdan be removed from Camp Echo (where he had been held in psychologically debilitating solitary confinement for almost one year) and returned to the area of Camp Delta where other detainees are held.
Lt. Cmdr. Swift told us that he had given the good news to Mr. Hamdan and that he was very excited about the prospect of getting a fair trial. Neither Swift nor [his civilian colleague] Neal Katyal would say what he thought this decision meant for the some 550 other detainees held at Guantanamo and the few awaiting trial. But I expect it to have significant effects, precipitating similar petitions by all of those detained here. Of course the government has already stated it will appeal the decision and seek a stay, advancing the same arguments it has made about commander-in-chief powers since it began designating individuals “enemy combatants” in 2002.
But at least, Judge Robertson's court has now told us that in its view, Guantanamo is not a place free of the protections afforded by the US Constitution and the Geneva Conventions.
Here's how Cover wound up his piece:
I can't add much to what everyone is learning, thinking, and feeling these days about Fallujah.
I just note that the current massive incursion of foreign (that is, US) fighters into the city is a tragedy and a travesty against all the norms of reason and international law.
The Guardian, citing NPR, is reporting some large-scale desertions among the Iraqi forces who were supposed to be "spearheading", or at least accompanying, the US assailants:
Juan Cole reports that the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni party that has been in the interim government so far, is now threatening to quit it. Also, Moqtada Sadr's people and the (Sunni) Association of Muslim Scholars have both called on the members of the "Iraqi" forces to desert rather than join the operation against Fallujah.
If the "Iraqi" forces have indeed now lost two-thirds of that battalion-- and who knows what has happened with other battalions?-- it strikes me that once again, as already happened in April and July, the US-Allawist insistence on pushing forward with a militaristic assault has resulted in setting back the project to (re-)constitute a new national force, as well as to (re-)constitute a new national political order.
It is quite possible that the only people left in the "Iraqi" battalions after the big desertions, are Kurds. What will that do for inter-ethnic entente in the country, I wonder?
... It seems clear to me that the timing of the assault has been calibrated to fall between last week's US elections and the opening November 22 of the "Iraqi reconstruction conference" in Sharm al-Sheikh. I guess the Americans wanted to have the worst of the assault all over and "mopped up" before the conference opens.
But who on earth knows what will happen between now and then? Violence will always beget more violence.
Timing-wise, the synchronicity between these extremely tragic affairs in Iraq and Arafat's long demise in Paris is also very significant...
It is, indeed, possible, that the leaders from G-8 countries, and Iraq and all its neighbors, and representatives of the UN, the Arab league, and the Islamic Conference who will be meeting together on Nov. 22-23 in Sharm al-Sheikh will be there at the same time that Arafat needs a big funeral.
It is anyway inconceivable that those particular world leaders will be meeting there at that time and not discussing the Palestinian issue with great gravity...
Note that in contrast to the big, hastily-convened, "anti-terrorism" conference held in Sharm al-Sheikh in spring 1996, Israel will not be present at this one, but Syria will be...
Anyway, no time to pursue this further now. Watch this space.
Our family was deep back in the other side of the camp and none of us had any idea that such butcheries were going on here. Israeli snipers were controlling this street that we're walking along, and they wouldn't let anyone cross it from one side to the other.We walked further along the street, then turned in to a roughly 70-by-70-foot, almost bare, yard to the left.
The killing went on all that Thursday night, there in the area on the other side of the street. But we thought it was just 'more fighting, as usual'. We could see the flares the Israelis were using to light up the area, and we could hear the shooting. Finally, a couple of young boys were able to cross the road and they brought us news of what was happening inside there. Then we knew! Oh, God, we knew...
There was a well-conceived piece by Nick Blanford in yesterday's Daily Star, looking at the security situation along Lebanon's southern border with Israel. He was examining in particular the fears some people have that Palestinians in S. Lebanon, upset or enraged or whatever after Arafat's death, may launch attacks across the border, against Israel.
He noted that,
Hizbullah is careful to protect its tactical control of the Blue Line, aware that the finely-tuned rules that govern border clashes can easily be upset by unauthorized attacks. Hizbullah's militants are deployed along the length of the 110-kilometer border, some at small observation posts, others armed and in military uniforms staking out the remoter stretches of the frontier. The fighters have been known to stop armed Palestinians on their way to the frontier and hand them over to the Lebanese authorities. Israel is aware of the occasionally useful role its arch foe plays in helping maintain calm along the border, hence the willingness to play down last week's Katyusha attack.
No word (as far as I could see) about what kind of communications and sensors were on the drone... which would of course be the crucial factor.
Hizbollah said it was doing this in response to Israel's many, many incursions--by drones as well as manned aircraft--into Lebanon's airspace.
See, for example, this short UN report of an appeal that Kofi Annan's special rep in Lebanon, Staffan de Mistura, issued Thursday, that Israel cease that practice.
It noted that de Mistura issued his statement,
I am really delighted with the news from Gaza (as reported by the BBC) that,
The prospect of Hamas and IJ joining a broad-based leadership would certainly help to stabilize the situation inside Palestine during the present transition, because:
(2) These two groups have considerably more internal discipline and dedication than the secular-nationalist groups, led by Arafat's own Fateh, that have monopolized PA/PLO decision-making until now.
Beyond the immediate transitional arrangement of some kind of joint PLO/PA/Hamas/IJ ruling council the only plausible way to reconstitute any kind of a more lasting Palestinian leadership that can actually save Israelis and Palestinians from an escalating disaster at this point is to hold nationwide Palestinian elections in which all these different groups participate/compete.
Dr. Mustapha Barghouthi, the head of the Palestinian National Initiative has been at the forefront of the call for Palestinian national elections. He has argued that elections are, "a vital precondition for peace". He notes too that
It has, after all, increasingly become the general practice in recent years that when elections are held in the context of a (hopefully) conflict-terminating process, those members of the affected national communities who have been living as refugees outside their homeland have been recognized as equal stakeholders in the outcome and included in the vote.
Think South Africa, 1994. Bosnia. Kosovo... And most recently Afghanistan, and now also Iraq.
In all those cases (and probably others), given that the conflict that was about to (hopefully) be terminated had generated thousands or even millions of refugees along the way, there was full recognition that those refugees should not be summarily disfranchised but should instead be fully included in any electoral process.
How realistic is this in the case of Palestine? Extremely realistic indeed. The UN body that has been providing relief services to the Palestinians since 1949, UNRWA, maintains a full register of Palestinian individuals who meet its (extremely stringent) standards for relief-aid registration. Those rolls could form the basis of a refugee election-registration roll.
I stress that this would be imperfect, because it would be far more restrictive than the total number of Palestinian refugees now living in the nation's global diaspora.
But what it would, importantly, capture, are just about all the refugees who are most needy-- those who are still stateless and are living in dire straits here in Lebanon, or in slightly better circumstances (though still stateless) in Syria. It would also capture the large number of registered Palestinian refugees inside Jordan.
What's more, given that UNRWA already has schools and health clinics for the refugees in all these areas--as, too, for those in Gaza and the West-- those facilities could be used to help confirm the regustration roills and then to hold the election.
The Palestinians have only had one quasi-national election before today. That was in 1996, when Yasser Arafat was elected head of the PA and 80 or so members were elected to the PA's parliament. (By the way, that election went off extremely well.)
But the 1996 election, by design, excluded all those Palestinians living elsewhere than in the West Bank or Gaza. In my view, that was a terrible mistake. Among other things, it left Palestinians living outside the homeland feeling they had no stake in the Palestinian "future" being devised by Arafat and Co.
... Now is, truly, a significant moment in the whole Israeli-Palestinian conflict. With the transition to a post-Arafat world, with Tony Blair's new activism on this issue, and with the US more directly and precariously involved in the region than ever before, there is a possibility that some real progress might be possible. (There and, let's keep hoping, inside Iraq.)
Obviously, none of this will be possible if Sharon maintains his policy of bloodyminded aggression against the Palestinians.
Just yesterday, for example-- at a time when US envoys were calling for calm at the time of the Arafat transition-- the IDF decided to kill two Palestinians in a helicopter strike in Gaza.
According to the Beeb, the IDF said the two men "were suspected of carrying explosives." Only "suspected", mind you... Not even the IDF was able to come clean out and say, "Yes, the men actually were carrying explosives, and here's the proof..."
That's how trigger-happy they have become... Poof! They snuff out two (or possibly, three) men's lives on the basis of a mere, unsubstantiated "suspicion". (And you know what? Even if they were carrying explosives, in a civilized country there would be ways of incapacitating them that did not involve snuffing them out.)
Unbe-*!*!*!*-lievable!
That whole Israeli policy of wilful and quite gratuitous assassination of "suspected" Palestinian militants has to end. Obviously. Otherwise, why would the Palestinian militant groups ever have any incentive to rein in their own violence?
So will the new Bush administration make this case for de-escalation to the Israelis-- and back up this request with a real (re-)structuring of the incentives to Israel?
Who knows? It would be nice to say Yes. But I'm not, obviously, holding my breath for the answer yet.
I just do think it's important to keep on pointing out that there are ways to address and resolve all these seemingly intractable problems using means other than violence. And carrying on using the violence--by all sides-- will just keep everyone in the terrible situation in which they already are....
Whatever can be wrong with offering the simple recognition that all Palestinians are human, and as such are entitled to human rights just as much as all Israelis?
Anyway, isn't President Bush supposed to be in favor democracy in the Middle East these days? I kind of thought that was his current shtick...
Starting with decent free elections in Palestine--and including the diaspora Palestinians in them--would be a fine, fine way to start.
I saw this clip on the Beeb last night and have just found the story on their website. It's the one where a US Marines Colonel called Gareth Brandl says:
"But the enemy has got a face. He's called Satan. He lives in Falluja. And we're going to destroy him."
What seems to me almost as disturbing is the degree to which BBC reporter Paul Wood, newly embedded with Brandl's unit, has lost the objectivity and humanitarianism that is essential for good reporting of any difficult conflict. In particular, despite the really unpleasant content of the quote above, Wood describes Brandl glowingly as, "a charismatic young officer."
Wood also reports that the "deputy commanding general, Denis Hajlik" gave the newly embedded journalists the following very crude description of the startegy the Marines would pursue, going into the city: "We're gonna whack 'em."
But then the Beebman immediately gives us his own little commentary, assuring us that, "This is not bloodlust."
I can't figure out what is happening here. Is it the psychodynamics of embedment, which are designed by the military to persuade the embedded journos to adopt the hosting forces' own view of the world? Or is it the BBC, having gotten a bloody nose from Blair over the whole Andrew Gilligan affair, now kowtowing more than ever to provide a view of the war that will back up Blair's insane posture in support of it?
Maybe a bit of both.
Well, I wonder how, in years to come, Hajlik, Brandl-- and Wood-- will all look back at the role they played in this bizarre, hate-fueled campaign to "destroy a city in order to 'save' it"...
I'm sitting here in Beirut sifting a zillion things in my mind... One is regret that I haven't mustered the courage to do what I had hoped to do while I've been here, which was to go to Iraq... braving a certain degree of risk, it is true... and doing some firsthand reporting from there.
In the end the degree of risk looked just too great. Or, am I getting old and flabby? Did I lose my nerve? Well, I'm sure you don't want to hear me maundering on about my personal woes.
Anyway, I have good news for you. Dahr Jamail, a good reporter who looks from his pic to be 25 years younger than me, has just taken the plunge and gone back to Iraq. So now, the rest of us can all live out my earlier, fear-quashed hopes vicariously, through Dahr.
Here is an excerpt from the first post he put on his blog after getting back there, Friday:
We talk with the wife and daughters while the electricity cuts off again and again-they tell me how they just finished a stint of 72 hours straight with no electricity. One of the daughters tells of how while in school the other day she listened to rockets flying over her building. “This is a war here, we are living like animals,” she says wearily, “How long can this continue?”
We mustn’t stay long and are off to run errands before I go find a hotel. Every moment finds us watching to see if we are followed-the kidnapping has become out of control. [Abu Talat] explains that even people who give information about westerners to crime gangs can earn $500. In a place with 70% unemployment, this is the only lottery. Just like in any economically depressed area, more and more folks are becoming willing to take a shot at the jackpot.
The deep red sun peers through the pollution as the breaking of the fast approaches (it is Ramada). We go to a few stores to pick up supplies for me and Abu Talat tells me not ever to speak English in public…we are both on the lookout, ever careful…for the safety of both of us.
Iraq has again transformed into a different country…as had happened between my previous two trips. Between November ’03 and late January ’04, other journos and I were able to ride around together, walk the streets, even sometimes at night. We shared the same hotel without fear of kidnapping or car bombings.
My last trip [March - June 2004] this was transformed into one westerner with one interpreter, and rarely more than that. A rogue band of us stayed in a dive hotel off the map and kept our heads down, and didn’t do too much traveling around the city without an interpreter. Car bombs had become the norm, and the mood of Iraqis had grown sullen and bitter.
Now, today…it is yet another country. As I type this a gun battle of automatic weapons rattles down the street, Falluja has been sealed prior to imminent attack (as it was on the day I entered Iraq for my last trip, April 4th), and the mood in Baghdad is tense with gloomy expectation. The feeling is that of a war zone, people are downtrodden, tense and angry, chaos reigns and nobody is safe…anywhere.
All this against the backdrop of the recent news of another four years with Mr. Bush and his junta. Now the people of Iraq prepare to slide further into the hell that is occupied Iraq as the siege of Falluja looms over Baghdad as a heavy, damp night settles over this once magnificent capital city.
I was just watching the BBC... they're awaiting some important news from the French hospital re the Old Man... What I did see, however, was a tiny video clip, unremarked by their correspondent, that showed my old bud David Pearce, once a UPI journo and now the US Consul-General in Jerusalem, leaving the Muqataa in Ramallah.
US officials have been forbidden from meeting the Palestinian leadership for a while now, in line with Sharon's attempt to boycott Arafat completely.
Seeing David at the Muqataa like that just reminded me of the kinds of much-needed contacts that will become possible after the Old Man's passing...
Arafat's physical passing, taken along with Tony Blair's very well-timed intervention urging Bush to move fast back into Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking, means that some interesting things could indeed happen on the peace front in the next few weeks. (See previous post.)
It is quite possible that the main thing David Pearce was talking about at the Muqataa was plans for a (future) funeral. Where will Arafat be buried? Which world leaders will want to attend, and which will be allowed to attend?
How about the Arab leaders, in that regard?
All fascinating questions. Plus, Islamic burial norms mean the burial should occur within 24 hours of the announcement of death. So maybe the "coma" will have to last a little longer while they iron all these details out?
Sorry to be so grisly about all this. Of course, I still wish him and his family all comfort through this passage.
... BBC still not showing anything from Percy Hospital. H'mmm.
Ze'ev Schiff is a crusty old guy, one of Israel's founding generation, and I admit I've grown very fond of him and his wife Sara over the years. We disagree on a number of things, but agree on many others; his heart is in the right place, and he's often quite ready to think outside the box.
I admit, at earlier points in the present intifada, his writings seemed to get a little hard-line for my taste. On the other hand, he's always been a real gentleman, and he even tried to help me get into Gaza last February.
Now, he's back in fine form with a good new column in today's Ha'Aretz. It's titled "Time for an Israeli initiative."
He starts by writing that Israel has had-- and missed-- four "major opportunities [since 1967] for a significant change in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict." Then, he notes,
Instead of demonstrating courage, the tendency is to freeze everything and to wait until perhaps we receive divine confirmation for the step. And, in the meantime, the window of opportunity is closed. Past experience teaches us that we can also create opportunities when we reach a crossroads, like the present one, when Arafat's leadership and his domination of the Palestinians are fading away.
At the moment we have to wait and avoid direct involvement in the coronation of kings, which we tried to do in the 1982 Lebanon War. Nevertheless, we have to prepare an Israeli initiative.
These parameters relate to a division of the territory, partition in Jerusalem, an exchange of territories and the problem of the Palestinian refugees.
The second element, with which we have to begin, is an Israeli declaration of willingness to withdraw in the West Bank to the lines of September 28, 2000, the eve of the present conflict. That is a positive initiative, in anticipation of a renewal of negotiations with a new Palestinian leadership.
Can we expect Sharon to follow Schiff's advice? I wish. But I ain't holding my breath yet...
Schiff, by the way, has been a Defense Correspondent in Israel for just about ever, and knows many successive generations of leaders of the Israeli officer corps very well.
In Israel, as in today's USA, the men who lead the military are often far more wary of military adventurism than their civilian bosses... Today's HaAretz also carries the story of the resignation of the IDF commander in the Gaza Strip, Brigadier General Shmuel Zakai, after a row about whether it was he who four weeks ago leaked to the paper news that the army allegedly supported pulling out of the Jabalya refugee camp at that time, while Sharon objected and "ultimately impos[ed] his will on the IDF."
That latter story has more interesting details about the affair, including about the introduction of polygraph testing into the investigation into who had been responsible for the leak.
The Jabalya operation was of course the main IDF operation in Gaza in October, which resulted in over 100 Palestinian deaths there and the demolition of many homes, schools, etc.
What better way to respond to news that George W Bush has been elected President of the USA for the next four years than to go and visit contacts in Hizbullah, and in the Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila, here in Beirut?
Hizbullah... Which has been listed by the US State Department as a "foreign terrorist organization"... Which has also been targeted in a US-inspired Security Council resolution that requires Lebanon to disband all "militias"..
...But which also happens to have been elected to no fewer than 12 seats in Lebanon's 128-member parliament... and to have won control through popular elections of more than 140 municipalities throughout the country.
Hizbullah is quite a poster-boy for democratic control of local and national institutions! Just the folks to talk to about George W Bush's extensive plans for democratizing the Middle East, don't you think?
And then, there's Shatila camp... Location of one of Ariel Sharon's more notable earlier attempts to "solve" the Palestinian people through terror and extermination. I'll write more about that, in a later post.
But meanwhile, back to Hizbullah... Back in the mid-1990s, the Lebanese people were chafing under a corruption-riddled system in which municipal leaderships had not been elected since 1963. Hizbullah was at the forefront of a movement to ensure accountable, democratic control of the municipalities, and managed to win government acquiescence in the idea of popular elections for municipal councils...
That first round of new local-level elections took place in 1998, and Hizbullah did fairly well in them. They did even better in the second round of municipal elections earlier this year, which indicates that their people performed pretty well during their maiden terms on the councils. (The local elections here Lebanon reflect the "popular will" of the electorate much more directly than the national-level elections. These latter consist of numerous small, multi-member contests conducted according to arcane rules specifying the religious affiliation of each of the candidates.)
So, being all in favor of finding out more about Hizbullah's experiment in popular democracy, I set out this afternoon for their headquarters in the --Hizbullah-controlled-- southern flanks of the city.... Also known here, more simply, as the "Dohhiya" (the suburb)...
I reckon that what people call "Beirut" is actually four or five cities all rolled into one. Where Bill and I are living right now is Ras Beirut, a cosmopolitan, relaxed, and slightly chaotic area in which Muslims and Christians and Druze all rub shoulders very easily. The campus of the American University, where we are staying, has a few women students wearing some form of Muslim veiling. But those veiled women will walk along easily with female colleagues wearing strapless or off-the-shoulder decolletes... and the off-the-shoulder crowd definitely seem to be the majority here. Many of them are Muslim, but most are probably Christian. It's just not an issue.
In addition, there's the chic Christian area of Ashrafieh, in east Beirut, where lovely little Armani stores butt up against nightclubs and of course the ever-popular Starbucks. Then, there are huge areas of religiously mixed poor regions, many of them straddling the jagged scar of the civil-war-era "Green Line" that cuts right through the city...
And then, there's the Dohhiya, a collection of three "suburban" muncipalities that butt seamlessly onto each other and Beirut proper, and which from the 1970s on provided a home away from home for hundreds of thousands of Shi-ite refugees fleeing from war and disruption in their home-villages in the south of the country.
If I say "suburb", an American reader might get quite the wrong idea of lovely tree-shaded, planned dormitory communities. The Dohhiya here is more like "suburb" in the French sense of bainlieue... but actually, somewhere between that and the Third World's omnipresent shanty-towns... Here, the Dohhiya is sort of like a very overcrowded, three-dimensional, concrete-constructed slum. Or at least, that's how the area used to be, until Hizbullah started running the three municipal councils.
Now, it is just one precarious notch up from being a total slum... They have brave little tree-planting projects that have put spindly saplings along many of the hopelessly crowded streets. The streets are--miraculously--kept fairly clean. There are plans afoot to manage the terrible scourge of the region's traffic. The eight- and nine-story apartment houses look terribly overcrowded... But the streets all have brave new signs on them: "Ayatollah Khomeini Boulevard", "Imam Musa Sadr Avenue", etc etc.
(Did I tell you Hizbullah is overwhelmingly a Shi-ite party? I thought you might just have guessed by now. They do, however, have two of their 12 MPs who are Sunni Muslim, and one who's even a Christian.)
Well, I went to finish up a series of three interviews I've been doing with Hizbullah officials, looking back at the party's notable record of having (1)liberated all of South Lebanon (except for, possibly, one contested area called the Shebaa Farms) from Israeli occupation and (2) reinvented itself as the most modern and effective political party on the Lebanese political scene. Evidently, there are huge numbers of potential lessons here for anti-occupation resistance organizations in both the occupied Palestinian territories and Iraq, so I welcomed the opportunity to go and talk to some Hizbullahis about how they look back on their own history, and also how they view those other anti-occupation struggles.
I know that for many Americans, the name "Hizbullah" may conjure up mainly images of wild-eyed terrorists, kidnapers, and suicide bombers. Bill's good friend Malcolm Kerr, then the president of AUB, was murdered here in his office on campus in 1984 by people widely thought to have been Hizbullahis. Dealing with such memories is not easy, and nor should it be.
In this regard, I note the following: In 1982, Ariel Sharon's army had launched a completely gratuitous and very violent assault against Lebeanon and occupied one-third of the country. (Malcolm had to stand at the gate of AUB to prevent the Israeli tanks rolling right on into the campus.) But Sharon's invasion and subsequent occupation got a clear green light from the Reagan administration...
The Palestinians suffered the worst at the time (see "Shatila"); but the Shi-ites in South Lebanon also suffered very badly indeed--in 1982 and then right through to May 2000 (see "Khiam"). Those were desperate years for many in the Shia community... Also, Hizbullah was far from being an organized force in 1982-85. It didn't come into existence at all until after the Israeli invasion, and wasn't able to consolidate any kind of internal discipline till 1985.
Killing Malcolm Kerr, an evidently noncombatant community leader, was clearly a major rights abuse, not "justified" by any of the above. Nor were the kidnapings of numerous western hostages in Lebanon in those years justifiable in any way. But hundreds of Lebanese Shiites were being killed, kidnaped, and otherwise abused by the occupation forces in those years; and those abuses too were equally unjustifiable...
Thank God that era is-- for now! more or less!-- behind us here in Lebanon (though quite analogous craziness is ruling the day within Iraq.) Here in Lebanon, I think there's only one Lebanese hostage still being held by Israel--Samir Qantar-- and the remains of one one last Israeli air force flier downed while he was bombing Lebanon-- Ron Arad-- still to be returned to his family.
Anyway, I had a good discussion yesterday with Hizbullah's head of Media Affairs, Muhammad Afif. He and the other Hizbullahis I have encountered here all seem to belong to a new, very serious and disciplined generation of Lebanese political activists. Their discourse is nearly all couched in terms of the values of good citizenship like "accountability", "civic equality", "the need to combat corruption", rather than specifically religious values, though they sometimes adduce religious sayings to back up what they are saying.
It seems like they are still busy building their political organization and skills. They have so far resisted all invitations to enter any Lebanese government, but their bloc in parliament works to protect their interests fairly well. I have a sense that they're biding their time a little, politically, trying to build their community back up after all the terrible hammerings it took during the years of Lebanese civil war and Israeli occupation. One of their big projects, that's been in place for several years now, is called the Jihad al-Bunna' -- that is, the "construction jihad". It helps to organize, finance, and implement all kinds of infrastructure projects around the country. Good for them.
The party officials I talked to say they have longstanding relations with many strands within the Iraqi Shiite community... Indeed, that these relations go back to long before the aborted (by hand of George HW Bush) Iraqi Shi-ite uprising of 1991. The party's weekly paper, Al Intiqad, has correspondents in Baghdad (as well as in Gaza and Jenin.)
I asked Afif whether he feared that the recent US-sponsored Security Council resolution (# 1559) that calls for the disbandment of Hizbullah's militia as well as Syria's withdrawal from intervention in Lebanese affairs, would hurt Hizbullah badly. (This-- unbelievably enough-- comes from a US administration that is intervening in a most massive and most destructive ways in the affairs of Iraq these days!)
Afif said, in effect, that resolution 1559 might hurt some, but not too badly, since they have been through much worse things before...
Anyway, I'm going to use that interview, and two others that I conducted with his colleagues, in a piece I'm starting to pull together for Boston Review on the situation here. Lebanon is always one key "cockpit" in which the bigger powers fight out their contests in this region. It'll be interesting to see what happens here.
Meantime, I think it's really important that we in the west don't fall too easily into the trap of stigmatizing Hizbullah completely, solely on account of Bush's totally un-nuanced policies in the war against terrorism. Hizbullah are doing some good and interesting things here, and many of the things they work for are quite legitimate. If we say it's okay to have parties in Europe that are explicitly "Christian" and democratic (as in Germany), or in Israel that are explicitly "Jewish" and only barely democratic, then maybe we should say there is room in a country like Lebanon for a party that is explicitly Muslim but also committed to democratic practice in national affairs.
Incidentally, that's probably also one of the least-bad outcomes we could hope for in Iraq.
There have been lots of reports that the "shock and awe" component of the Rumsfeld-Cheney invasion of Iraq last year was directed primarily not at the Iraqi people--who were merely to be pawns in this nasty game--but towards China.
Was it in "Plan of Attack" that I read some evidence of that? Or was it someplace else?
Well, it could make sense as an explanatory theory... Perhaps... Except that if the idea of launching that particular war, in that particular way (using lean, mobile forces... the kind that can be fairly easily deployed over large distances... Ooops! But they ain't much good at running an occupation!) ... If it was indeed Bombs-Away Don's brilliant idea that doing that would scare the Chinese shitless, then... he scored one heck of a large-scale own goal, didn't he?
How shocked and awed do YOU think the Chinese are by his little display of power (and its less than glorious outcome)?
In the International Herald Tribune today, Jane Perlez writes:
A profound rearrangement is under way, with China and its expanding economy leading the charge, and in some instances, it's to the exclusion of the United States...
At the same time, the central banks of China and Japan are holding $1.3 trillion of U.S. government debt, a position that gives Asia quite a bit of leverage, economists say.
She adds:
"I think today, circa Nov. 1, 2004, respect for the United States is at a historic low," said Noordin Sopiee, the chairman of the Institute for Strategic and International Studies in Malaysia.
"The key factor that underlies U.S. unpopularity - and the U.S. has never been more unpopular - is not any specific policy, but the simple fact that the U.S. is No. 1. That makes everybody uncomfortable."
Noordin said he believed there were some "perceptive" officials in Washington who understood China's reach in East Asia. "But everyone in America, from top to bottom, seems captured and confined by a particular American world. Everyone else, the rest of mankind, seems to live in a different world."
When it comes to writing the diplomatic history of the Bush administration, the war in Iraq and American fears of terror will dominate. But it will also certainly be recorded that this was the period when American influence in Asia, the driving force of the region in the second half of the 20th century, began its downward spiral and America did not see it.
We can be pretty sure that a jubilant Prez Bush, his mandate strengthened, will continue the war-to-the-finish against Fallujah. (Read Riverbend's views of this here.)
How will the "decisive" phase of this assault be waged? Or, how is it already being waged?
Daniel O'Huiginn of the Cambridge (UK)-based Campaign Against the Sanctions in Iraq, has been tracking the BBC monitoring reports of the means the US forces used in their assaults on Tel Afar and Samara in recent weeks. These provide many worrying precedents as to what may happen in Fallujah.
Especially regarding the strong possibility that the US forces may cut off the water to the city, in clear contravention of the laws of war.
Here's how Dan sums up his reading of the BBC-monitored media clips:
a) water went off in Tall Afar and Samarra during the recent attacks on
them. [doesn't seem to be much on Fallujah yet, despite the Washington
Post claiming the water was turned off there a couple of weeks ago]
b) this is being discussed by Iraqi politicians, and is giving yet more
ammunion to their complaints about coalition behaviour (this is useful in
lobbying: most politicians want the coalition to be seen to be liked)
The aspect I'm still uncertain about (though it seems the best
explanation) is
c) there is an intentional US policy of denying water to civilians as part
of military action.
I haven't had time to go through what he provided and edit or even reformat it at all, so I'll just upload it here. It makes sobering reading. (Remember that Brits write their dates Day/Month/Year.)
I hope the folks in the big international human-rights groups are working on this issue of the laws of war.
So it looks like we lost the damn election... I had been trying to steel myself for this, but still it feels like a body blow.
I guess those of us w/ foreign passports could take the easy way out and just stop thinking of ourselves as Americans. I don't want to do that though. I want to retreat to my bunker in central Virginia and figure out how to reform this imperial beast into something better.
But just think of all the human misery that will occur-- inside the US and outside it--before that reform project can take hold.
I am desperately trying not to feel angry with those of our "fellow citizens" who voted W in this time.
Big kudos and thanks to everyone in the peace and justice movement in the US for all their get-out-thevote efforts!!! Maybe in 2008 I should make a point of not quitting the country at election time so I can join that effort more wholeheartedly.
If the Empire ever lets us vote again, that is...