'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Iraqi elections and American mirrors

It will probably be some time before it's possible to get a good, rounded picture of what happened during today's elections in Iraq. It will likely take the Iraqi Independent Elecoral Commission many days to provide its "count" of the vote, which would include a figure for the turnout.

But even then, given the lack of any independent observing, many questions may well remain about whether people can generally trust what the Commission reports...

I watched ABC News's World News Sunday tonight. Peter Jennings was there in a safari jacket, reporting from somewhere in Baghdad's Green Zone, I think. A high proportion of ABC's reporting had a cheerleading, distinctly editorializing tone to it. On their website they feature this piece by AP writer Sally Buzbee, which starts out:

Iraqis embraced democracy in large numbers Sunday, standing in long lines to vote in defiance of mortar attacks, suicide bombers and boycott calls...

Look, I don't want to impugn the courage that many Iraqi voters showed as they went to the polls today. But I'm not sure that "embracing democracy" was the only-- or perhaps, even, the main-- thing they were doing as they went there. "Responding to an ayatollah's command" might equally well, or even better, describe the motivations of a high proportion of the voters.

After all, simply casting a vote is not the essence of democracy. (They got to do that numerous times, under Saddam.) The essence of democracy surely lies in acting from a deep commitment to using deliberation and negotiation to resolve differences, rather than violence; and an equally deep commitment to ensuring the rights of all members of society, including (especially) those with whom one disagrees.

Maybe the people who went to the polls today in Iraq will show those characteristics. I sincerely hope so. But they did not necessarily show them today, simply by going to the voting places.

I think quite a lot of US media outlets have used Buzbee's piece. Some have used an alternative offering from AP that doesn't have her cheerleading tone but, more soberly, gives a series of snapshots, from six different parts of the country. Most of the snapshots were penned by people with Arab or Kurdish names.

For his part, George W. Bush saw no need to be either judicious or sober in coming out with his expression of jubilation at the "resounding success" that he claimed the election represented.

Back in October, at the time of the Afghan election, I wrote here that:

I understand that there are many, many people in the international community who desperately want the inauguration of decent electoral demnocracy in Afghanistan and Iraq to be successful. I am myself one of them. But I fear there may be some people who are so deeply invested in the success of these elections--even though, in Afghanistan, they seemed to be held on terms very vulnerable to US manipulation--that they are prepared to overlook what in other circumstances they might clearly recognize as fatal flaws in the system.

The same is even more true today. Let's wait and see how credible the rest of this current voting process looks, and what results it generates, before we make any judgments about its worth.

Even more to the point, let's see whether the election leads to the emergence of an Iraqi leadership that is truly prepared to stand up to US power-- and how the Bush administration peole will deal with that.

The Bushies have already drawn one key, defiant line in the sand. Brad Graham and Peter Baker reported in the WaPo today that,

The Bush administration has for now ruled out creating a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq after today's elections...

So much for all the President's earlier averrals that he would "withdraw the troops from Iraq, if asked."

UNU conference on Transitional Justice

Time was, there was a nearly wall-to-wall constituency among western human-rights advocates and other liberals for the viewpoint that any country transitioning into democracy or out of massiveoy violent conflict should be the subject of war-crimes trials. That was back in the mid-1990s, after the UN Security Council had successfully set up the ad-hoc international tribunals for former-Yugoslavia (early 1993) and Rwanda (late 1994), and people in the international h.r. movement were well on their way to achieving their goal of establishing a permanent International Criminal Court.

I was an enthusiastic part of that constituency. (I've been an Amnesty International member for-- nearly-- ever, and have sat on Human Rights Watch's Middle East advisory committee since 1992.) But starting in late 2000, I was one of the first people in the h.r. movement to start to raise serious questions about whether this passion for extensive war-crimes prosecutions actually served the human rights and interests of peole in societies trying to recover from violent conflict.

For some of my early writings on this topic, see this short June 2001 piece in the London-based magazine Prospect, or this longer piece on the Rwanda Tribunal and the Nuremberg precedent, that ran in Boston Review in April/May 2002.

For quite a while there, I felt that my position was extremely lonely. After all, in the US, when I started to question the wisdom of the pro- war crimes courts position that put me in the company of folks like the Republican Party anti-ICC forces and assorted isolationists, "Christian Nation" freaks, and other Manifest Destiny cheerleaders in general.

And on the "other side", cheering on the various war crimes courts and shouting for ever more courts and more prosecutions, were most of the people I most admire and affiliate myself with in the world. Oh well, I thought through the issues again and again and again, and set about trying to build and test the empirical basis for my position by pursuing my research on three conflict-terminating countries in Africa that all adopted very different approaches to the atrocity-response challenge.

I was delighted last fall when Ramesh Thakur, the Vice-Rector of the United Nations University invited me to take make a presentation at a conference that the UNU held this past week, in New York, on the theme of "The Rule of Law and Transitional Justice: the Way Forward?" Also speaking there were Ralph Zacklin, the Assistant UN Secretary-General for Legal Affairs; Bill Schabas, a distinguished Canadian legal scholar who has published widely on the law of genocide and war crimes and has helped set up a number of UN-backed tribunals in recent years; Gerald Gahima, the former Attorney-General of Rwanda; and various other luminaries in the field.

Delighted, but also quite a bit trepidatious. I had thought that my view of the lack of utility--or even, on many occasions, the disutility-- of war crimes prosecutions as a way to help conflict-terminating societies address the legacies of recently past atrocities would be very much the position of an "outlier" in a room largely full of people dedicated to pushing forward the prosecutions policy.

Well, maybe I should spend more time in New York. It turned out that my views were not so much those of an outlier. The proceedings of the discussion were generally off the record. But I was really happy to learn how much some of the reservations that I had been expressing are also now shared by people whom formerly I would have identified as being much more strongly in the pro-prosecutions camp. These included both Schabas and Gahima. At several points, conference participants made comments that indicated that they really do "get" a number of points I have been making repeatedly over the past four years, such as that:

• atrocity commission is in many cases very closely associated with the incidence of bitter political conflict; therefore, an atrocity-suppression strategy must include finding a sustainable and rights-respecting termination of those conflicts
  
• in the conflict-termination process it is the politics and diplomacy of that process that is the key to its success; therefore, any "transitional justice" or "rule of law" strategies adopted in those circumstances should be subordinated to, and be a part of, that politics and diplomacy; such strategies should always be pursued within a clear and pro-peacemaking political context
• it is the residents of the conflict-torn territories themselves who should be considered as the primary "stakeholders" or "constituency" for any TJ/RL interventions; therefore, the desires and interests of other actors in the international community should be subordinated to the needs of the local-level stakeholders

But let me back up a little, and describe a couple of the most interesting other things I got out of the conference...

Firstly, the presentations made by Ralph Zacklin, Bill Schabas, and numerous other participants gave me a much richer understanding than I'd hitherto had of the broad history of the phenomenon of international war-crimes tribunals. Thus far in my work I'd been concentrating mainly on the work of the two big ad-hoc tribunals established by the Security Council, and to a lesser extent on the ICC. But at the conference I learned a lot more about the multiplicity of different forms of "shared-jurisdiction" tribunals that have been established in recent years, in Sierra Leone and elsewhere. I learned more about the latest form of UN-backed war-crimes court intervention, which is to provide strong UN technical help to national jurisdictions to establish their own sepcial war-crimes tribunals (in Bosnia-Herzogovina, and elsewhere). I learned more about the joint-jurisdiction court that the UN was able to establish in Sierra Leone alongside a truth commission, defying the view that former ICTY/ICTR Chief Prosecutor Louise Arbour once expressed, that the work of a war-crimes court should precede both in both time and in "jurisdiction" the work of any truth commissions...

In addition, I gained a much richer general understanding than I'd had before of the way that the whole "transitional justice" field has developed between the time it first became an identifiable field of inquiry and practice in the early 1990s, and today.

Back in the early 1990s, the dominant type of "transition" being addressed by TJ theorists and practicioners was of the kind that the countries of east and central Europe were making from authoritarianism to newfound democracy. As the new leaders of those societies came to deliberate on how to deal with the opporessions and violations their societies had suffered in the past, they were able to draw on and synergize with experiences that some Latin American countries were also making. At that stage, they weren't really looking at centrally at prosecutions as the mainstay of their strategy, but more at truth commissions and administration measures like vetting procedures or lustration (open up the files on the past.)

And then came the Bosnian wars of 1991-92, and the groundbreaking step the UNSC took in February 1993 when it created the ICTY. You can argue, as I have, that the SC took that step mainly as the substitute for having a workable policy toward the Bosnian conflict. (That certainly proved to be the case when the SC created the ICTR 18 months later: when diplomacy and peacekeeping approaches failed, they sent in large armies of highly paid prosecutors!)

With the establishment of the ICTY, the whole field of transitional justice was transformed almost overnight, and for the eight or nine years that followed it was almost completely dominated by the idea that the aggressive pursuit of war-crimes prosecutions should and now could make a massive contribution to human wellbeing. The paradigm there was (a certain reading of) the history of the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46. The establishment of the ICTY was followed fairly rapidly by that of the the SC's second ad-hoc tribunal, the ICTR. Meanwhile, human-rights advocates around the world made huge gains in pursuit of the previously elusive goal of establishing a permanant International Criminal Court. Legions of highly paid lawyers made their way to The Hague and to the seat of the ICTR in Arusha, Tanzania. (For my description of ICTR's workings, go here .) In their wake-- in the case of The Hague, if not Arusha-- came waves of international journalists and other opinion-formers. Nearly all these participants in and professional observers of the war-crimes prosecutions process contributed to, and actively propagated, the view that international war-crimes prosecutions could help to build a new world where the end of "impunity" would help reduce human suffering around the globe.

It didn't quite work like that...

But the establishment of ICTY and ICTR proved to be a turning-point in more ways than one. For not only was the content of the "transitional justice" field thereafter shifted massively toward considering prosecutions to be the or a major mechanism in the field-- but also, the purview of the field became shifted to one that started to deal more and more with conflict and post-conflict situations rather than with transitions from authoritarianism to democracy. In other words, the nature of the "transition" the field dealt with changed quite radically.

In either kind of transition, offers of amnesty had always previously been one major tool in the hands of diplomats and other negotiators. From 1993 on, it became far harder for negotiators to be able to use that tool. The ANC and NP negotiators in South Africa only managed to squeak through with their offers of limited, individual amnesties to major perpetrators of past atrocities because of the enormous moral clout of Nelson Mandela and the other negotiators.

... At present, a number of pro-prosecutions theorists and enthusiasts seem finally to have come around to an understanding that the tool they have been perfecting and whose use they have been vociferously advocating in all kinds of different failed-state, conflict, and post-conflict situations may not actually be very well suited to the task. At the same time, members of the international community involved in other types of work-- primarily, economic and social development work-- in those kinds of challenging situations have been dealing with the issues of good governance, social and economic stabilization, and the building of mechanisms to ensure the nonviolent resolution of local conflicts from the ground up. Many of those types of project, which typically are spearheaded by the UN's massive and fairly experienced Development Program (UNDP), have been doing much more to promote the rule of law, and the end of a climate of impunity at the grassroots level in conflict-wracked countries than the extremely expensive and geographically far removed war-crimes courts have ever been able to achieve...

So I think that's where the "next wave" of attention should rightly go: into supporting those kinds of rule of law efforts, coupled with a lot more dedicated capacity-building for the national governments concerned. And that was certainly the tack being taken by a surprising number of the other participants at the recent conference, which was good.

I could write a lot more about various themes I heard from other participants at the conference: a warning that calls for "justice" should not always be heard as calls for "the establishment of a criminal justice process", and therefore, an interrogation of the whole concept of "justice"; the need to use a proactive, elicitive approach to finding out the preferences of the local actors involved, and the concomitant difficulty of determining--in many of these situations-- who it is that actually "speaks for" the relevant communities; a questoning (such as I have engaged in on a number of occasions) of what it is, exactly, that one hopes to achieve through enacting a punishment against someone; etc etc.

Grist for three or four more very good conferences!

But now, I have to run. So what I'll do here is I'll just upload the written version of the presentation I made at the conference. I wrote it last Monday or so-- but already, now, I would want to revise it if I delivered it again. No matter, it is still a work in progress. If anyone wants to quote from it, remember that it is not a final text and please get my permission before you do so.

Hamas victories, Gaza municipals

Another round of important Middle Eastern elections was held Thursday-- the municipal elections in Gaza's 25 cities, towns, and villages.

The Palestinian population of Gaza is about 1.3 million, with 80% of those people being refugees from inside Israel (or, the descendants of those original refugees from 1948, who also have refugee status and burning but still unaddressed claims against Israel basedon that. They did get to vote on Thursday.)

Hamas won 78 of the 118 seats being contested, according to this story in yesterday's WaPo, which also spelled out that Hamas won control of seven of the ten "towns" (for which, read "towns or cities") being contested.

The movement's victories in Gaza follow the ones they registered in a few West Bank jurisdictions on December 23, as I posted about here.

That WaPo piece, by John Ward Anderson, is worth reading because it gives a broad but fairly well informed assessment of the meaning of the elections. The New York Times did not mention them until today, when their reporter Steven Erlanger did so in a very dismissive and classically "orientalist" way.

First of all, Erlanger only writes about the Strip having "towns and villages", though Gaza City is very evidently a city. (Okay, Anderson did that, too.) But it's a sort of typically orientalist/colonialist thing to do to down-grade the designators used for population centers. Many of what the Israelis call "villages" in the occupied territories or Lebanon have far greater populations than what the Israelis call "towns" inside Israel.

But instead of making his own independent assessment of the importance of the vote, or quoting one of the many very well informed Palestinian commentators on it, Erlanger's first comment on the vote came from-- you guessed it,

a senior Israeli military official [who] said the results were not especially important, given the influence of local clans that supported slates of candidates. The vote had more to do with local issues than national policy, the official said.

And then, Erlanger did nothing to challenge, balance, or even qualify that assessment, leaving it standing as the most authoritative "analysis" he provided. All he did was add a little "local color" in the form of a quote from a Palestinian "housewife".

Lazy journalism, or bias? Most likely, a bit of both.

The idea that in any analogous conflict, one would present the "analysis" of "a senior military official" of one of the contending powers on the internal politics of the other power to be in any way objective or authorittative would be outrageous. (Oops, it happens all the time in US reporting on Iraq. But in all cases, it's more significant for what it tells us about the way the quoted official is trying to "spin" the situation than for what is actually happening inside the community being commented on.)

Note the reference to "clans", which is a way of downgrading and dismissing the importance of the Palestinians' internal political processes that the Israelis have used non-stop since 1948...

Regardless of all that spin, the internal politics really are interesting. Hamas is emerging more and more as a smart and well organized political force.

I am really glad that I have my big article on Lebanon's Hizbullah in the works at Boston Review, since one of the reasons I wrote it was to look at Hizbullah's political strategy as a possible predictor for what either Hamas and the Shiite parties in Iraq might do.

At this point, Hizbullah's record seems a much better predictor for Hamas than for the Shiite parties.

Alert readers may say, "Yes, Helena, but isn't Hamas Sunni?" Yes, indeed it is. But the coordination between it and Hizbullah has been notably strong ever since, in December 1992, Yitzhak Rabin unwittingly sent about 400 cadres from Hamas to study at "Hizbullah University" in the bare hills of South Lebanon.

That has to be one of the great ironies of history. Rabin had recently been elected PM, and he was determined-- five years into the first intifada-- to "teach the Palestinian militants a lesson". (Have we heard that before?) So what he did, in a midnight raid, was round up more than 400 Palestinian militants, including many Hamas cadres, from their homes and seek to deport them all summarily to Lebanon...

Well, the Israelis had been summarily deporting Palestinian community leaders to Lebanon-- in small numbers-- for as long as anyone could remember. This time, he would surely teach an even bigger lesson! Right?

Indeed not. The weather gods conspired against him. He couldn't have his military people bundle all the detainees, as planned, onto helicopters as per normal operating practice and fly them to be dumped in the no-mans-land just north of the Israeli-held positions inside South Lebanon... He had to put them all into buses instead, which trundled northwards through the fog and blizzards...

Meanwhile, Avigdor Feldman, a really wonderful Israeli human-rights lawyer, had been alerted to the plan. He rushed to the Supreme Court in the middle of the night, and tried to get an order to stay the expulsions. I forget the exact legal outcome, but his action did slow the expulsion process sufficiently that the Palestinians and their friends around the world were able to start a huge diplomatic-political mobilization.

You have to understand that for Palestinians, any mass expulsions from the homeland revive terrible memories of the ethnic cleansings of 1948.

So Lebanon, where Hizbullah by then had some seats in parliament, categorically refused to take in the expellees. The United States and other western powers were forced to act to prtess Israel to reverse what is a crystal-clear breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention-- that is, the expulsion of any indigenous residents from occupied territories. (The previous string of much smaller-scale expulsions had never gotten so much high-level diplomatic attention.)

The expellees were left stranded in the no-man's-land, while the world powers tried to work out a resolution of the issue.

That was also the precise period in which Rabin and Peres were deciding to push forward with their "Oslo" discussions with Arafat and Abu Mazen. The expulsion attempt also seriously upset those negotiations.

The resolution that was eventually reached was that the Israelis would take the expellees back in stages, over a number of months.

Meanwhile, they stayed there in tents in the no-man's-land... for months.

You have to remember that in Lebanon, it was not only the government that didn't want 400 extra Palestinians offloaded into the country. A broad majority of Lebanese was still, at that point, very anti-Palestinian in their sentiment. Most precisely, most Lebanese deeply don't want Palestinians to be resettled inside Lebanon.

The main people among the Lebanese who took a real interest in the welfare of the Palestinian expellees stuck out there on the hills were-- Hizbullah. Soon, the whole encampment had reportedly been turned into a series of seminars and experience-sharing on all aspects of their parallel struggles.

Both parties had a lot of very valuable experience to share by that point: Hamas, which had come into existence right after the start of the first intifada in late 1987, and Hizbullah, which came into existence after Israel's large-scale invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

... And so, in the municipal elections held in Lebanon last May and June, Hizbullah made a strong showing, winning control over even more municipalities than they won back in 1998. They did so based on three things:

(1) their proven record of being able to provide services in an atmosphere remarkably free of the corruption that has generally plagued municipal administrations in Lebanon for decades;

(2) their ability to be a part of, understand, and "play" effectively in all the local political power games; and

(3) their party's pursuit of a national political program that many, many of their constituents support.

Not surprising that, in Palestine right now, Hamas should be showing many of the same abilities.

Btw, if you missed the little preview I gave of my Hizbullah project here on December 22, 2004, you might want to check it out.

Ghaith's photo essay for the BBC

The BBC website has a good little photo essay about Iraqis' views of the election. It's been compiled by Raed's friend Ghaith, which gives me a lot of confidence.

Alongside it, they have another burst of the sort of highly mediated, "blog"-like thing they did once before from Iraq. This one has some interesting material. But a disproportionate number of the (invited) "contributors" are expats--whether "contractors", whatever that means, or at least one US military person. They don't really seem to know much about Iraq.

So while the "blog" is a little bit interesting, it's not nearly as interesting as Ghaith's photo essay.

There's a place for good journalism. There's a place for (real) blogs. But fake blogs-- h'mmm.

Kennedy gives withdrawal movement new traction

I only just got the chance to read the excellent speech that Senator Kennedy gave last night, on Iraq. It was well argued and well framed.

Much of the press commentary focused on the fact that this was the first time a U.S. Senator called clearly for a US withdrawal from Iraq. But the way he framed his argument was more nuanced, and better grounded, than that:

The beginning of wisdom in this crisis is to define honest and realistic goals.

First, the goal of our military presence should be to allow the creation of a legitimate, functioning Iraqi government, not to dictate it.

Creating a full-fledged democracy won’t happen overnight. We can and must make progress, but it may take many years for the Iraqis to finish the job. We have to adjust our time horizon. The process cannot begin in earnest until Iraqis have full ownership of that transition. Our continued, overwhelming presence only delays that process.

... To enhance its legitimacy in the eyes of the Iraqi people, the new Iraqi Government should begin to disengage politically from America, and we from them.

The reality is that the Bush Administration is continuing to pull the strings in Iraq, and the Iraqi people know it. We picked the date for the transfer of sovereignty. We supported former CIA operative Iyad Allawi to lead the Interim Government. We wrote the administrative law and the interim constitution that now governs Iraq. We set the date for the election, and President Bush insisted that it take place, even when many Iraqis sought delay.

It is time to recognize that there is only one choice. America must give Iraq back to the Iraqi people.

We need to let the Iraqi people make their own decisions, reach their own consensus, and govern their own country.

We need to rethink the Pottery Barn rule. America cannot forever be the potter that sculpts Iraq’s future. President Bush broke Iraq, but if we want Iraq to be fixed, the Iraqis must feel that they, not we, own it.

The Iraqi people are facing historic issues—the establishment of a government, the role of Islam, and the protection of minority rights.

The United States and the international community have a clear interest in a strong, tolerant and pluralistic Iraq, free from chaos and civil war.

Then, a very realistic, but far-reaching suggestion:

The United Nations, not the United States, should provide assistance and advice on establishing a system of government and drafting a constitution. An international meeting – led by the United Nations and the new Iraqi Government -- should be convened immediately in Iraq or elsewhere in the Middle East to begin that process.

And then, he comes to the part about the withdrawal strategy:

Second, for democracy to take root, the Iraqis need a clear signal that America has a genuine exit strategy.

The Iraqi people do not believe that America intends no long-term military presence in their country. Our reluctance to make that clear has fueled suspicions among Iraqis that our motives are not pure, that we want their oil, and that we will never leave. As long as our presence seems ongoing, America’s commitment to their democracy sounds unconvincing.

The President should do more to make it clear that America intends no long-term presence. He should disavow the permanence of our so-called “enduring” military bases in Iraq. He should announce that America will dramatically reduce the size of the American Embassy -- the largest in the world.

Once the elections are behind us and the democratic transition is under way, President Bush should immediately announce his intention to negotiate a timetable for a drawdown of American combat forces with the new Iraqi Government.

At least 12,000 American troops and probably more should leave at once, to send a stronger signal about our intentions and to ease the pervasive sense of occupation.

As Major General William Nash, who commanded the multinational force in Bosnia, said in November, a substantial reduction in our forces following the Iraqi election “would be a wise and judicious move” to demonstrate that we are leaving and “the absence of targets will go a long way in decreasing the violence."

America’s goal should be to complete our military withdrawal as early as possible in 2006.

President Bush cannot avoid this issue. The Security Council Resolution authorizing our military presence in Iraq can be reviewed at any time at the request of the Iraqi Government, and it calls for a review in June. The U.N. authorization for our military presence ends with the election of a permanent Iraqi government at the end of this year. The world will be our judge. We must have an exit plan in force by then.

While American troops are drawing down, we must clearly be prepared to oppose any external intervention in Iraq or the large-scale revenge killing of any group. We should begin now to conduct serious regional diplomacy with the Arab League and Iraq’s neighbors to underscore this point, and we will need to maintain troops on bases outside Iraq but in the region.

The United Nations could send a stabilization force to Iraq if it is necessary and requested by the Iraqi government. But any stabilization force must be sought by the Iraqis and approved by the United Nations, with a clear and achievable mission and clear rules of engagement. Unlike the current force, it should not consist mostly of Americans or be led by Americans. All nations of the world have an interest in Iraq’s stability and territorial integrity.

All very good sense, so far. It is only at the third and last plank of Kennedy's position that I have serious reservations:

Finally, we need to train and equip an effective Iraqi security force. We have a year to do so before the election of the permanent Iraqi government.

The current training program is in deep trouble, and Iraqi forces are far from being capable, committed, and effective. In too many cases, they cannot even defend themselves, and have fled at the first sign of battle.

Well, I have no disagreement at all with that last bit of diagnosis. But the prescription he gives-- that "we" (i.e. the US) should be training up the new Iraqi forces? I don't think so!

Actually, the problem in Iraq is notably not one of people lacking military training. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have that! The real problem is that of motivating the Iraqi soldiers to rally around the leadership of their legitimate government. Of which, right now, they don't have one.

Indeed, the Americans are almost the last people on the earth who are in a position to lead the effective reconstruction of the Iraqi armed forces, given (1) the hostility and polarization that their presence has already engendered throughout most of the country, and (2) the deep, underlying lack of legitimacy of the US troop presence in Iraq.

So I think that when Sen. Kennedy is talking about the need for the UN to have a real role in Iraq-- both politically, and in leading a possible "Stabilization Force" in the country-- he should also be talking about the UN giving whatever technical help the Iraqis might need, in order to reconstitute their armed forces.

They might not need that much help-- though certainly, South Africa and many other countries could give them pointers on how to transform large armed forces once loyal to a dictatorship into a much smaller force structure whose role is to defend a democracy under the norms of democratic force management.

Hey, the US has already had a crack at rebuilding the Iraqi forces-- for more than 18 months now. And time after time after time we have seen that the result has been the dissolution of those forces when they come under test. Why should Senator Kennedy or anyone else pretend that this is something the Iraqis might still "need" ther US forces for?

Still, disagreeing with that last point of the Senator's is a small matter. The main thing is, he has given the pro-withdrawal movement in the US significant new political traction.

"Transitional" elections: Iraq and South Africa

In the early 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the successful staging of democratic elections in various spots around the world became the act of political ritual that came to symbolize the transition of whole nations from authoritarianism to democratic self-rule. In South Africa, the successful staging of the April 1994 election symbolized not just that, but also an amazingly peaceable transition from white-exclusivist colonial rule to a one-person-one-vote democracy in a situation in which the non-White South Africans outnumbered the "Whites" by about seven to one.

Iraq is not South Africa.

As I think I've written here before, there is one key similarity between SA-94 and what ought to be happening inside Iraq at this point: that is, a handover of the main reins of power from a previously ruling minority group to members of the majority group-- hopefully, with good guarantees from continued democratic and tolerant interaction between all citizens.

But in South Africa, the negotiations over how that should occur happened before the elections. They also happened without the intrusive, massively violent, and polarizing presence of a gigantic foreign occupying army.

Yes, the SA "Defence" Forces under the apartheid regime were a terrible and grossly abusive blight on the lives of most South Africans. But at least all the people in those armed forces, from Defence Minister Magnus Malan down to the legions of coerced black "askaris" who worked under the control of the SADF were members of South African society who had a stake in the success of the transition to majority rule.

The same is notably not true of the US troop presence in Iraq.

I have expressed the hope in the past that the presence of the US forces would lead to a unifying-- in opposition to that presence-- of many of the different strands inside Iraqi society. Last April, that seemed about to be taking place-- that was when there were anti-US battles raging in both Fallujah and Najaf and much of the rest of the Shiite south.

After that, the US occupation forces managed to "pacify"-- imperfectly, but sufficiently-- the mainstream of the Shiites. They did that using a very wily combination of both carrots and sticks. One of the main "carrots" was the promise made to Sistani back in April that the Constitution-writing body would indeed be elected, not appointed; and that was the origin of the elections planned for this Sunday.

(Sistani wanted to have them much sooner. But the Americans wanted to stall-- I wonder why? They claimed it "would not be fair" to use the old ration-card rolls as an electoral roll, and that time was needed to constitute a new roll. Guess what? They never did that, and are going along with the suggestion Sistani had originaly made... So they could have had the elections in May if they'd wanted, and skipped out on all the past nine months of killing and violence.)

Then, the Americans prepared their massive-- and, as they hoped, "decisive"-- assault against the Sunni militant base in Fallujah.

I was really sad to see so many Shiite political figures supporting that assault. Moqtada Sadr, to his credit, never did.

I mean, I know that just about all the different strands of Shiite society have been hit very hard indeed by terrorist attacks from people alleged to be in or around the groups directed by the extremely shadowy-- and possibly apocryphal?-- Abu Musaeb al-Zarkawi. But still, the tacit or on occasion overt support that some Shiite leaders gave to the assault on Fallujah gave the US occupation planners a huge opportunity to try to deepen the Shiite-Sunnite wedge and even present the US forces as somehow "protecting" the Shiites' safety and interests.

Oh well, soon enough we will see what effects the upcoming "elections" might have.

At many levels, they seem almost irrelevant. We know that their conduct will be deeply flawed-- and also, that we won't even be able to tell how deeply flawed they are, because of the total lack of transparency in all steps of their conduct.

The "main" contest that seems to be shaping up is that for "first place", between the Allawist list and the Sistanist list. How different are the leading figures on these two lists? I used to think, significantly different-- at least on the issue of how they would propose to deal with the US troop presence.

Now, I am not so sure. Trudy Rubin had an important piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Tuesday-- sorry, I don't have the link-- in which she reported on recent conversations she'd had with many leaders of the Sistanist list:

Until recently, leaders of the majority Iraqi Shiite community insisted that the Americans should leave after elections in 2005. The party platform of the United Iraqi Alliance - the Shiite bloc expected to win the largest share of Sunday's vote - called for a timetable for the withdrawal of multinational troops.

Now, Shiite leaders have changed their minds. In a move little noticed by
the media, the Alliance has dropped the call for a timetable from its
platform.

The Alliance has not yet publicized the change; it took me days and many
trips to party headquarters to get hold of a copy of the revised version of
the platform.

But the policy shift reflects a growing fear in the Shiite establishment
that if the Americans leave soon, the Sunni Baathists who persecuted them
under Saddam might make a comeback. The Shiite community is also under
siege by radical Sunni Islamists from inside - and outside - Iraq who
consider Shiite Muslims to be infidels. These fanatics are trying to foment
civil war.

...

"If the United States pulls out too fast, there would be chaos," I was told
by Iraqi Vice President Ibrahim Jaafari, one Alliance candidate for prime
minister. "We would expect Iraq might break up because we don't have a
powerful government to prevent this from happening. So it's difficult to
mention a date until the situation gets back to normal."

Finance minister Adel Abdel Mahdi, another Alliance candidate for prime
minister, elaborated: The current violence, he said, has "created some
realistic thinking about the American presence." At first, the Alliance
wanted "a certain timetable," but then concluded that any U.S. exit had to
be linked to progress in fighting terrorists and providing security for
Iraqi cities.

The revised platform plank doesn't mention withdrawal. It says only that
the Alliance seeks "an Iraq which is capable of guaranteeing its security
and borders without depending on foreign troops."

Of course, the fact that so many leading figures on the UIA list have also been high-ranking members of the US-appointed, Allawi-led "transitional government" also means that the contest between the two lists in the election has less of a clearcut political basis and something of the aspect of a falling-out among thieves...

I think I come back to a judgment I made quite a while back-- that the party system inside the Shiite community in Iraq is still woefully under-developed. That's not surprising, given the terrible repressions to which the community was subjected by Saddam's regime. But it does mean that the emergence of one or more smart, large parties with a clearcut anti-occupation and "nationalist" orientation that is capable of reaching out politically to members of the country's other communities, as Hizbullah has done in Lebanon will probably take some more time.

And "time" seems to be just what the Bush administration seems quite happy to have a bit more of in Iraq, as it continues to pound the ethnic-Arab parts of the country back from the level of very decent human and economic development they had won by the end of the 1980s, ways, ways back into the Stone Age.

Time may, however, start running out for the occupation forces pretty soon.

There will almost inevitably be a large amount of political chaos inside the country after the elections, after the election results are "counted" and then, as will almost inevitably be the case, are strongly contested by whoever is not declared the "winner". Or, there may be some more very unseemly horse-trading between people on the two "big" ethnic-Arab lists.

Should that post-election chaos be successfully navigated-- and this is not guaranteed, then the next tasks of the new ruling group will be serious ones: to re-define (or, equally significantly, to choose not to re-define) the relationship with the Americans; and to write the Constitution.

Neither of those tasks will be easy. I wish I had more confidence that the people on the UIA list were up to them. Maybe the Sadrists were right to--in general-- urge the boycoting of the election.

Hallelujah!

This, from AP:

Israel has stopped targeting Palestinian militants for death, according to Israeli security officials, fulfilling a key Palestinian demand for a truce to end four years of violence.

The whole of that story is really interesting. It includes an account of a phone interview that Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal gave to an AP reporter in Beirut today. (Which mentions some of the main points I noted in my previous post here.)

Security coordination in Gaza is going ahead, and Saeb Erakat has said that he and some Sharon aides have started preliminary discussions about setting up a Sharon-Abu Mazen meeting.

The Israeli irredentists are also organizing to "resist" being evacuated from Gaza and the four small West Bank settlements on Sharon's "first to evacuate" list.

Mashaal's interview

Here is my translation of the interview that Hayat's Ghassan Charbel recently conducted with Hamas secretary-general Khaled Mashaal. (And here is the link to the Arabic original.)

Mashaal's word is the definitive word at this point, regarding the movement's political position.

What he says here accords closely with the reported Hamas position paper that I wrote about (and linked to) here, on January 19.

Inb particular, in the interview Mashaal talks about the importance of "realizing true [Palestinian] sovereignty over the areas from which the [Israeli] occupation withdraws" -- without spelling out whether or not he means the occupation of 1967.

On the crucial issue of a truce, he is reported as saying:

There is talk about a calming, but about a conditional calming until the time that the occupation becomes committed to defined terms, the most important of which are the ending of all forms of aggression and attack and assassinations and killing, and the release of all the Palestinian prisoners. And in the event that the enemy should comply with these terms we in Hamas and also the other forces of the resistance, in general terms, we would be ready to deal positively with the issue of calming or a provisional truce.

I find another aspect of what he says also extremely interesting. This is the way he talks about Hamas's political relations with the PLO.

People who don't know much about Palestinian history probably need to understand that there's a huge depth of animosity between Hamas and the PLO that goes back a long way, and was certainly exacerbated greatly by many actions that Yasser Arafat took.

So long as Arafat was alive, he didn't want Hamas included anywhere at all in Palestinian decisionmaking structures-- and they hated and distrusted him him greatly, in return. Back in 2003, Abu Mazen did try to bring them into an expanded leadership structure during his short-lived term as PM, and won their preliminary agreement to the move. But Arafat nixed it totally, which was a good part of the reason that Abu Mazen resigned. (Read some reflections on what happened then in this piece I published in BR last spring.)

But then, Arafat died....

Now, Abu Mazen has a much better shot than he did 18 months ago at bringing Hamas into the leadership. I believe they trust him much more than they ever did Arafat.

Two aspects of what Mashaal says in this regard are particularly interesting:

Firstly, he says that Hamas (along with the other 'factions of the resistance'-- i.e., the non-PLO factions) is now prepared to enter the PLO itself, albeit a PLO "restructured" along the lines he advocates.

Secondly, he says that what is really needed is a "Higher Source of Authority" (marji'iyeh ulia)for the Palestinian people-- but that a restructured PLO could play that role.

What is particularly significant about those utterances? Well, regarding being prepared to come in under the PLO umbrella for the first time, this looks like a very pragmatic move. The PLO as such enjoys wide legitimacy and acceptability from regimes in the Arab and Islamic worlds and elsewhere. Many of those regimes have been very constrained by strong US pressure from having any open dealings with Hamas-- which the US has designated as a "foreign terrorist organization".

Of course, the US pressures did not stop the Egyptians from inviting Mashaal to Cairo on at least one earlier occasion when they wanted his help in putting in place a ceasefire in Gaza. (As referred to in the latest interview.) But in general, it's been hard for Hamas to operate securely and efficiently just about everywhere, under its own name. Mashaal himself was the target of an Israeli CW attack in Jordan a few years back; and last fall a Hamas second-ranker was assassinated by a car-bomb in Syria.

Coming in under the PLO umbrella would, I think, give Hamas a new range of places where they could operate, without having to go through the whole humiliating and time-consuming process of trying to do something open about rolling back the US government's worldwide ban.

And then, the question of the "Higher Source of Authority". Well, it does have a very Shi-ite ring to it, as a term, doesn't it? I think that's interesting.

For many, many years the PLO's main claim (contested by Hamas) was that it was the "sole legitimate representative" of the Palestinian people. Now, Hamas proposes giving the PLO a different--and notably more religious-sounding-- kind of self-definition.

All these are issues of internal Palestinian politics that will be fascinating to watch over the weeks and months ahead.

But the first order of business is the truce. Will the Israelis join (and therefore consolidate) it, or not?

I have this sneaky suspicion that, having been able to run rings around Yasser Arafat since 1993-- mainly, by playing the old man's seemingly boundless personal vanity-- the Israelis have finally come up against some Palestinian leaders who are astute, self-disciplined, well organized, and have a seemingly impressive command of the world of politics.

The months ahead should be very interesting ones. Even, perhaps, a period in which we could some real progress in-- or at least, a consrtuctive reframing of-- the peace negotiations.

Hamas agrees to truce

Khaled Mashaal, the top leader of Hamas, has now told al-Hayat that Hamas "is prepared to suspend attacks if Israel stops targeting militants and agrees to release thousands of Palestinian prisoners," according to this story by AP's Lara Sukhtian.

I'll be heading over to the Hayat website to get the text of that interview. (In a couple of hours I leave for New York, so I hope I can read the interview on the plane.)

Sukhtian writes:

Mashaal said Hamas, which has called for Israel to be replaced by an Islamic state, would agree to stop attacks if Israel ends "aggression, invasion, assassination, killings" and agrees to release all Palestinian prisoners.

"If the enemy abides by these conditions, we, in Hamas, and other resistance forces in general, are ready to deal positively with the issue of pacification or temporary truce," Mashaal told the London-based newspaper, which did not say when or where the interview was conducted.

I saw a story on Reuters late last night conveying in general that the truce negotiations with Abu Mazen had succeeded.

As I understand it, Hamas is agreeing to a ceasefire of limited duration, which quite understyandably they expect Israel to join. If that does not happen, evidently the ceasefire becomes null and void.

Sukhtian notes:

A senior Hamas leader in the West Bank has said the group has agreed to suspend attacks for 30 days to test Israel's response.

In summer 2003, Hamas had agreed to a truce that fell apart after less than two months.

Israel has refused to guarantee it would not pursue militants, but has said it will respond to calm with calm.

The general calming seems already to be happening. But the truce period will be a testing time for all parties.

Firstly, it challenges Sharon to truly back down from continuing to use violence, assassinations, etc., to impose his own version of "pacification" on the 3.5 million Palestinians of the occupied territories.

Secondly it tests the Bush administration to really help in moving Israel towards things Israel should have done a long time ago. Some short-term (but very important) things like releasing all the thousands of Palestinian detainees who are being held with no "probable cause" for their detention at all, and helping open up the Palestinian economy. But also, serious longterm moves like speeding up the total Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and moving immediately to serious (and long, long overdue) negotiations on all final-status issues.

Thirdly, it tests Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the other Palestinian militant groups to see if they truly can control their own, often hotheaded supporters and get them to go along with the truce. If they can, that will immensely strengthen their political position as a potential part of the Palestinian ruling coalition.

Fourthly and finally, it tests Abu Mazen-- both his intention and his capability. Personally, though, I think he's already passed all the many, many tests to which he's been subjected. He has the intention to make peace. But it's all the other parties-- particularly the Israelis and Americans-- which will determine whether he ends up with both the phsyical and the political capability of doing so.

Of course, the way the Americans and Israelis like to tell it, all this is really only a "test" of Abu Mazen.

But remember, back in summer of 2003, he passed an exactly similar test very successfully. The Israelis and Americans certainly didn't do what they should have back then.

Will they, this time? Let's hope...

Women getting WaPo-ed, update

Week 5 of the WGW watch has just finished. It was a "banner" week. 5.5 of the 34 op-ed articles published in the WaPo since last Tuesday were by women, for a one-week score of 16.5%.

How pathetic is that, if when 16.5% of the discourse in a certain place is contributed by women, we say that that constitutes a "banner" achievement?

At the end of Week 4 of the WGW watch, the cumulative score was 12 pieces out of 129, equals 9.3%. After this week's "banner" record, the cumulative score is 17.5 out of 163, equals 10.7%.

Woo-hoo! So on a cumulative basis, women now get to contribute a shade over ten percent!

I should note that where I've encountered uncertainty-- this week a "Robin" someone and a "Pat" someone, neither of whom yielded easily to a Google search that might reveal their gender-- I have erred on the side of "giving the benefit of the doubt", i.e. I counted those two as female.

(The fractional numbers, remember, come from co-authored pieces.)

This past week, in addition, two particularly significant things happned...

Marjorie Williams, a very gifted writer who was taken on by the WaPo as a columnist two or three years ago, died of cancer. She hadn't been able to write much over the past 18 months. I knew her a little. She was a warm-hearted, extremely talented woman and the mother of two kids. I'm really sorry about her death, and will miss her voice there.

Also, on Saturday, the WaPo editors got one of their number, a female, to write an op-ed piece about the furore that Harvard President Larry Summers raised when he suggested--at a conference on women in science and engineering--that innate differences might make women incapable of practising effectively in scinetific careers.

So guess what, the woman the editors chose to do this, Ruth Marcus, was one of those "queen bee" types of women who, having "made it" professionally on her own (as she thinks), then turns round and heaps scorn on other people who have continuing feminist commitments. (Think Jeane Kirkpatrick.)

In her piece, Marcus wrote about the reaction that Nancy Hopkins, a biology professor at MIT reported having to Summers' remarks:

"I felt I was going to be sick," said MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins, who had led an investigation into hiring practices there. She walked out during Summers's remarks. "My heart was pounding and my breath was shallow," she said. "I was extremely upset."

Marcus's snide comment on this was:

Was there a feminist around -- myself included -- who didn't wince at this bring-out-the-smelling-salts statement?

Well, Ruth Marcus, I'm here to tell you loud and clear that, I totally did not "wince" at Hopkins's statement. In fact, I thought it was very brave of her to talk so openly about what was evidently a very painful moment in her professional career.

Of course, in general, the phenomenon of the "good-ol'-boy"- dominated media wheeling out some self-serving member of a marginalized group to dump all over other members of that group and the claims they make on the power elite is an old, old story. Think of the stellar "careers" of Ann Coulter or Armstrong Williams (or Clarence Thomas) or whoever... The list is certainly long.

What a pity that Ruth Marcus lent herself to that nasty, dive-and-rule kind of game.

The New York Times, by contrast, did a much better job of addressing the Larry Summer issue on its op-ed page. On Sunday, they had two articles on it. One was by Olivia Judson, a distinguished evolutionary biologist at Imperial College, London who-- unlike Ruth Marcus-- really knows a lot about what she was writing about. The other, a sort of "counterpoint" to Judson's, was by Charles Murray, who I think is was a co-author of the problematic book, "The Bell Curve".

Judson's conclusion is this:

I think the news is good. We're not like green spoon worms or elephant seals, with males and females so different that aspiring to an egalitarian society would be ludicrous. And though we may not be jackdaws either - men and women tend to look different, though even here there's overlap - it's obvious that where there are intellectual differences, they are so slight they cannot be prejudged.

The interesting questions are, is there an average intrinsic difference? And how extensive is the variation? I would love to know if the averages are the same but the underlying variation is different - with members of one sex tending to be either superb or dreadful at particular sorts of thinking while members of the other are pretty good but rarely exceptional.

Curiously, such a result could arise even if the forces shaping men and women have been identical. In some animals - humans and fruit flies come to mind - males have an X chromosome and a Y chromosome while females have two X's. In females, then, extreme effects of genes on one X chromosome can be offset by the genes on the other. But in males, there's no hiding your X. In birds and butterflies, though, it's the other way around: females have a Z chromosome and a W chromosome, and males snooze along with two Z's.

The science of sex differences, even in fruit flies and toads, is a ferociously complex subject. It's also famously fraught, given its malignant history. In fact, there was a time not so long ago when I would have balked at the whole enterprise: the idea there might be intrinsic cognitive differences between men and women was one I found insulting. But science is a great persuader. The jackdaws and spoon worms have forced me to change my mind. Now I'm keen to know what sets men and women apart - and no longer afraid of what we may find.

On the subject of women's voices on the WaPo op-ed page, which I haven't written about for a while now, I just want to note that my own arguments for having more strong female voices in important places in the national discourse-- including the WaPo op-ed page-- come down to three:

(1) While all women are not feminists and some men are, it is still true that the life experiences of women do give them (us) many different things that we bring to the discourse on important matters. For example, my own role in trying to run a household during a war gives me a distinctively different view of war from that held by most of my male colleagues in the media (since they generally have someone else to handle household management for them.) The wisdom that women gain from their life experiences needs to be an integral and valued part of the national discourse.... And yes, I believe that may well strengthen the voice of opposition to gratuitous military "adventures".

(2) Being part of the national discourse gives a person the ability to help frame issues and persuade voters and policymakers. How can it be justified that at a place like the WaPo (white) males are so disproportionately given this power?

(3) Being an on-staff columnist at a place like the WaPo brings with it all kinds of economic benefits such as I (for example) have never in my career attained. How can it be justified that (white) males are so disproportionately favored with access to these benefits?

These are serious questions about gender equity and the valuing of women's voices that could and should be asked about the power structures at most of the leading media institutions in the United States.

I'm aiming for 50%. And why not?

Of course, given that men have been hogging the discourse for so darned long, maybe a little temporary "reparation" for women would be in order. Sixty percent for ten years, perhaps?

Professional "idealists" meeting reality

I've written a bit here before now (November 2003, January 2004) about the totally unproductive way in which North Carolina's Research Triangle Institute (RTI) approached the task of "building democracy" in Iraq-- based on its people's own faulty pre-war forecasts of the situation, some genuine (but extremely naive) idealism on the part of some employees, and the RTI leadership's keen desire to put their institute on the map and assure the continued payment of their own very comfortable salaries...

Now, North Carolina reporter Kevin Begos has done a good job reporting the total chaos into which the whole project collapsed. Including that:

RTI didn't start a single rapid-response grant in the second year of its $236 million government contract for democracy building in post-war Iraq.

Many of the problems stemmed from the rampant lack of security inside Iraq-- necessitating the purchase of $200,000 armored Mercedes cars for staff members, etc.

Begos quotes Wallace Rodgers, RTI's former team leader for the northern region of Iraq, as saying that:

he was working in the most stable region of RTI's work, yet by the time he left Iraq in October 2004, five of the Iraqi local governing-council members he had worked with had been assassinated.

But there were also, it seems clear, some very serious mismanagement problems. Begos also writes:

"There was all kinds of fraud I was coming across. It was rampant all over," said Dennis Moore, a certified public accountant from Massachusetts who while he was in Iraq reviewed scores of contracts for RTI.

"Of all the transactions I would go and check on, only one was free of problems," Moore said.

This Begos piece went up on the Winston-Salem Journal's website today. Thanks to Yankeedoodle for signaling it.

The site also had a companion piece from Begos in which a former founder of RTI and the dean of NC's congressional delegation both decried the secrecy surrounding RTI's performance under its democracy-building contract with the federal government.

In that one, Begos wrote:

All financial information about RTI's government contract was withheld by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, after a recent Freedom of Information request by the Winston-Salem Journal. The government agency said that the information was "sensitive and confidential commercial and financial information." RTI officials also have declined the Journal's requests to reveal salaries paid under the contract.

By the way, down near the bottom of the second piece is this interesting snippet about the Congressman concerned, Rep. Howard Coble (R):

Earlier this month, Coble, a staunch supporter of President Bush and chairman of the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security, created a stir by saying that "troop withdrawal ought to be an option (from Iraq). It ought to be placed on the table for consideration."

The bottom of the piece also reveals that public documents,

show that Victoria Haynes, RTI's chief executive officer, was paid a base salary of $367,500 in fiscal year 2003, not including benefits. Ron Johnson, the company's senior vice president for international development and head of the Iraq project, was paid $262,156.

These documents also reported that theformer founder of RTI who decried the secrecy, William Friday, was paid $500 for attendance at board of governors meetings.

Rumsfeld's "brave new world"

Time was, the leaders of the USA believed in a version of the "rule of law" at the international level-- that is, that every state should have equal rights and privileges; that no one state should be egregiously more "equal" than others; and that one set of mutually agreed regulations governed them all.

Time was, the most powerful members of the US political elite believed deeply in a set of "checks and balances" at the domestic level that would prevent any one branch of government from growing too strong.

Yes, those were the days.

... And now, welcome to the "brave new world" of Donald Rumsfeld, where the Pentagon feels free to send "special operations teams" with their own "interrogators" and "intelligence analysts" roaming freely throughout the world, constrained neither by any respect for international law nor by the scrutiny and oversight of any other portion of the US government.

It was a scary enough picture when Sy Hersh started sketching it out for us in his articles over the past couple of years in The New Yorker. It suddenly seemed even more scary than ever to me this morning, when I read this article by Bart Gellman, in today's WaPo

The piece is titled Secret unit expands Rumsfeld's Domain. It starts like this:

The Pentagon, expanding into the CIA's historic bailiwick, has created a new espionage arm and is reinterpreting U.S. law to give Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld broad authority over clandestine operations abroad, according to interviews with participants and documents obtained by The Washington Post.

The previously undisclosed organization, called the Strategic Support Branch, arose from Rumsfeld's written order to end his "near total dependence on CIA" for what is known as human intelligence. Designed to operate without detection and under the defense secretary's direct control, the Strategic Support Branch deploys small teams of case officers, linguists, interrogators and technical specialists alongside newly empowered special operations forces.

Military and civilian participants said in interviews that the new unit has been operating in secret for two years -- in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places they declined to name. According to an early planning memorandum to Rumsfeld from Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the focus of the intelligence initiative is on "emerging target countries such as Somalia, Yemen, Indonesia, Philippines and Georgia." Myers and his staff declined to be interviewed.

The Strategic Support Branch was created to provide Rumsfeld with independent tools for the "full spectrum of humint operations," according to an internal account of its origin and mission. Human intelligence operations, a term used in counterpoint to technical means such as satellite photography, range from interrogation of prisoners and scouting of targets in wartime to the peacetime recruitment of foreign spies. A recent Pentagon memo states that recruited agents may include "notorious figures" whose links to the U.S. government would be embarrassing if disclosed.

"Emerging target countries." Now, there's a scary concept...

Gellman makes quite clear that the new "humint" branch was set up to do jobs previously done only by the CIA. It will work alongside the various military "special operations forces" over which Rumsfeld's Pentagon now has control, having wrestled them away from control by the CIA. In both these areas, this means that the kinds of oversight that Congress won over the CIA back in the 1970s-- in response to disclosures of various CIA dirty tricks around the world-- will not be a[pplied to the Pentagon-controlled forces.

Gellman wrote Rumsfeld actually initiated both these changes back in October 2001. He writes that the changes,

address two widely shared goals. One is to give combat forces, such as those fighting the insurgency in Iraq, more and better information about their immediate enemy. The other is to find new tools to penetrate and destroy the shadowy organizations, such as al Qaeda, that pose global threats to U.S. interests in conflicts with little resemblance to conventional war.

In pursuit of those aims, Rumsfeld is laying claim to greater independence of action as Congress seeks to subordinate the 15 U.S. intelligence departments and agencies -- most under Rumsfeld's control -- to the newly created and still unfilled position of national intelligence director. For months, Rumsfeld opposed the intelligence reorganization bill that created the position. He withdrew his objections late last year after House Republican leaders inserted language that he interprets as preserving much of the department's autonomy.

...

Pentagon officials emphasized their intention to remain accountable to Congress, but they also asserted that defense intelligence missions are subject to fewer legal constraints than Rumsfeld's predecessors believed. That assertion involves new interpretations of Title 10 of the U.S. Code, which governs the armed services, and Title 50, which governs, among other things, foreign intelligence.

Under Title 10, for example, the Defense Department must report to Congress all "deployment orders," or formal instructions from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to position U.S. forces for combat. But guidelines issued this month by Undersecretary for Intelligence Stephen A. Cambone state that special operations forces may "conduct clandestine HUMINT operations . . . before publication" of a deployment order, rendering notification unnecessary. Pentagon lawyers also define the "war on terror" as ongoing, indefinite and global in scope. That analysis effectively discards the limitation of the defense secretary's war powers to times and places of imminent combat.

Under Title 50, all departments of the executive branch are obliged to keep Congress "fully and currently informed of all intelligence activities." The law exempts "traditional . . . military activities" and their "routine support." Advisers said Rumsfeld, after requesting a fresh legal review by the Pentagon's general counsel, interprets "traditional" and "routine" more expansively than his predecessors.

...

A high-ranking official with direct responsibility for the initiative, declining to speak on the record about espionage in friendly nations, said the Defense Department sometimes has to work undetected inside "a country that we're not at war with, if you will, a country that maybe has ungoverned spaces, or a country that is tacitly allowing some kind of threatening activity to go on."

Assistant Secretary of Defense Thomas O'Connell, who oversees special operations policy, said Rumsfeld has discarded the "hide-bound way of thinking" and "risk-averse mentalities" of previous Pentagon officials under every president since Gerald R. Ford.

"Many of the restrictions imposed on the Defense Department were imposed by tradition, by legislation, and by interpretations of various leaders and legal advisors," O'Connell said in a written reply to follow-up questions. "The interpretations take on the force of law and may preclude activities that are legal. In my view, many of the authorities inherent to [the Defense Department] . . . were winnowed away over the years."

After reversing the restrictions, Boykin said, Rumsfeld's next question "was, 'Okay, do I have the capability?' And the answer was, 'No you don't have the capability. . . . And then it became a matter of, 'I want to build a capability to be able to do this.' "

And so, one asks, what is the response of the Congressional committees whose main task under the Constitution is to provide oversight of military-related and intelligence operations?

At first blush, this might seem like a silly question. Because both Houses of Congress are now firmly in the hands of the Repuiblican Party. But Gellman's story has one intriguing little tidbit in it that indicates a degree of unquiet from "a Republican member of Congress with a substantial role in national security oversight". Gellman quotes this person as saying:

"Operations the CIA runs have one set of restrictions and oversight, and the military has another... It sounds like there's an angle here of, 'Let's get around having any oversight by having the military do something that normally the [CIA] does, and not tell anybody.' That immediately raises all kinds of red flags for me. Why aren't they telling us?"

So brave and plucky is this elected representative of the people's will that he (or she?) is described as "declining to speak publicly against political allies". That doesn't seem to bode very well for any robust exercize of this person's responsibility to exercise effective oversight.

So let me quickly run through some of the changes I've seen in the balance of power in DC's national-security decisionmaking machinery since I first moved to the US in 1982:

(1) Back then in the 1980s there was a GOP President, and the Democrats controlled both Houses of Congress. So of course the Congressional committees were generally eager to exercize rigorous oversight over national-security affairs. (The main exception to that was many matters to do with Israel, where Congress was always pushing for greater support for anything Israeli, and the administration in general-- even under Reagan-- tried to brake that momentum some.)

(2) The Democrats gradually lost control of first the House of Representatives, then the Senate. So now in the 2000s, we have another two-term Republican President, and we also have a totally Republican-controlled Congress. Many of the Republican members of the House Representatives (the lower House) are very scary people, heavily influenced by Christian fundamentalism, who know terrifyingly little about the world outside the US borders. The Senate Republicans, by contrast, include many much wiser and more experienced figures.

(3) At the level of the administration, meanwhile back in the 1980s and 1990s the Pentagon and the CIA were nearly always the more "risk-averse" agencies, while it was a more ideologized State Department leadership that generally pressed for various wars and interventions-- from giving tacit support to Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon and subsequent confrontation with Syria, through engegament in the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo.

(4) Three important things changed in this picture under George W. Bush. Firstly, SecDef Rumsfeld turned out to be far, far more militaristic than Colin Powell; so the Pentagon, with all its massive resources, became more hawkish and the State Dept relatively more restrained and risk-averse. Secondly, Rumsfeld and Cheney out-maneuvered both Powell and CIA head George Tenet, pushing them to the outer margins of real decision-making. Thirdly-- and this happened much more recently, long after Tenet and Powell had both been totally emasculated-- these men were spit unceremoniously out of the system. The ideologue Porter Goss was put in to replace Tenet. And this coming week the relative ideologue Condi Rice will take over from Powell.

So where on earth are internal checks and balances now?

Where is an international balance of power that can provide some restraint on this rogue-state leadership in Washington that flouts so many of the rules of international law?

Where are good sense, decency, and a sense of the interdependence of all the world's people?

Not much in Washington DC these days, I fear.

I fear for my country. I fear for the world.

Juan Cole's defense

So this morning, Juan Cole replied to my post of Thursday, in which I challenged the grounds he'd adduced for arguing against the announcement of a deadline for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.

His first counter-argument was this:

She can't understand why I think things could get worse if the US withdrew precipitously. I can't understand why it would be hard to understand. The Baathists would begin by killing Grand Ayatollah Sistani, then Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, then Ibrahim Jaafari, and so on down the list of the new political class. Then they would make a coup. Once they had control of Iraq's revenues, they could buy tanks and helicopter gunships in the world weapons bazaar and deploy them again against the Shiites. They might not be able to hang on very long, but it is doubtful if the country would survive all this intact. The Badr Corps could not stop this scenario, or it would have stopped all the assassinations lately of Shiite notables in the South, including two of Sistani's aides.

I guess the unspoken premise there was that he thinks it is solely the US military presence in Iraq that is preventing this dreadful scenario from taking place? Juan adduces no evidence whatsoever for such a proposition. Appropriately, because I don't believe there is any.

But if that proposition isn't true, then Juan's argument that the US military presence has helped and is necessary in order to continue to help to preserve the security of these Shiite leaders has no basis at all.

He is, however, willing to admit that,

The failures of the Fallujah campaign made it amply clear that the US armed forces are unlikely to make headway against the guerrilla insurgency, and in the meantime are just making hundreds of thousands of Iraqis more angry.

Yes, indeed. So it's hard to see how the US presence is actually contributing to the sense of security of the majority Shiite population in the country. Indeed, in recent days, tragically, we've seen yet more truly heinous attacks launched against Shiites in and near their places of worship... Including one in which the assailants had packed an ambulance with explosives.

I honestly don't believe that any Shiite community leaders inside Iraq feel that the Americans' presence there gives them any sense of security at all. (Except perhaps Iyad Allawai... But it's probably stretching it too much to call him a "Shiite community leader".)

Juan also writes, conveying somewhat of a sense of being privy to important insider information:

I was told by a US observer of the scene in Najaf that a member of the marja'iyyah asked the US to take care of the Mahdi Army for them last summmer.

Just "a US observer of the scene in Najaf..."? Frankly, I am not impressed. Juan doesn't tell us whether his source is someone who has reason to know anything at all about the subject. He doesn't tell us, either, whether perhaps there was an incentive for a person in this position to make this claim. He doesn't tell us anything about this person. Why heck, my dog's veterinarian could qualify as "a US observer of the scene in Najaf."

No, Juan, definitely not a convincing argument.

He also writes,

You will note that Sistani, who is not shy about these things, has not demanded an immediate withdrawal of US forces.

Well, Sistani may not be shy, as such. But he is-- as Juan has noted many times-- a political "quietist" who rejects the doctrine of wilayat al-faqih (the doctrine that earthly rule should be under the control of the leading theologian). Sistani is against the domination of politics by theologians; so, being himself a leading theologian, he speaks on overtly political matters extremely rarely indeed.

However, he has always been very intent on the procedural matter of holding elections for a popularly-mandated Iraqi leadership at the very earliest possible date, and with the goal that this will facilitate a speedy end to the US occupation.

Abdul Aziz Hakim, the eminent, hawza-connected SCIRI head who is #1 on the Sistanists' UIA electoral list, has gone considerably further. In two encounters with the British media over this weekend, Hakim spelled out a strongly pro-withdrawal position.

Talking with Hala Jaber of the London Sunday Times (one of my former employers) Hakim said that,

it will be the duty of the new [Iraqi] government to demand the withdrawal of American forces "as soon as possible".

"No people in the world accepts occupation and nor do we accept the continuation of American troops in Iraq," said Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

"We regard these forces to have committed many mistakes in the handling of various issues, the first and foremost being that of security, which in turn has contributed to the massacres, crimes and calamities that have taken place in Iraq against the Iraqis."

(Thanks to JWN commenter Dominic for the heads-up on that one.)

Yesterday, Hakim was quoted in The Guardian as saying:

As a matter of principle it is very clear that no nation accepts an occupation. It should be the Iraqi government that sets a timetable for the withdrawal of multinational forces. The Iraqi government and the occupation forces should cooperate together to find a suitable timetable in which they can work to have Iraq clear of any occupation forces.

Juan was also quoted in that same piece, bringing up his familiar India/Pakistan and Palestine 1948 examples.

Actually, I've been thinking about this topic quite a lot these past few days. My own arguments that the US should announce, and then implement, a speedy schedule of withdrawal go ahead at two levels. One is the level of facts and analysis, such as I engage in here and in Thursday's post. But at another level, too, I just feel very deeply that the US presence in Iraq is so illegitimate, because it was the result of a quite illegal war, that it should end, anyway.

If I could see any strong evidence that--despite the illegality of the "original sin" of the invasion of March 2003-- the present US military presence in Iraq was nonetheless doing worthwhile things, I might have to swallow hard and say, "Yes, the invasion was wrong, but at least they are doing X,Y, and Z worthwhile things there these days."

That would be a hard call to make. I would have been prepared to make it. But the proportion of "worthwhile things" the US presence has brought about in Iraq is so very, very tiny compared with the very harmful things they've done there that my conscience and my intellect can march happily hand-in-hand in urging a speedy and total US withdrawal.

And as for what comes next? Probably, members of the US citizenry-- who after all recently re-elected the aggressive war initiator George W Bush to be their/our president-- should be the very last people in the world to be consulted on "what comes next" in Iraq.

Personally, I would say, some form of serious UN transition mandate-- that is, something much stronger than the role that a grand total of seven UN employees are playing in "supporting" the upcoming elections-- could be helpful in easing the handover to genuine national independence.

But that is totally a call for an Iraqi leadership enjoying genuine popular legitimacy to make.

All that I, and 295 million other Americans can rightfully do for Iraqis at this point is say, "We are sorry. We are sorry. We are sorry. And what can we do to help make up for the wrongful acts of our government?"

Riverbend on water and civil/social collapse

Go read Riverbend's latest post to understand what war and civic instability end up meaning for real people and families.

Her reflections on how ghastly it is for people in heavily urbanized communities to live without piped water ring home very true for me. On several occasions when I was living, working, and trying to manage a household with young children in it during the civil war in Lebanon in the late 1970s, the city water supply would be cut off. Usually, because the electricity supply was cut so the city's water pumps weren't pumping.

Luckily, our big building of some 50 apartments did have a well in it. When the electricity was cut and our seventh-floor apartment's roof-level water-tanks had run dry we'd have to take jerry-cans down to the (minus-2) level of the basement; fill them; then haul them up to our home's level... For every single drop that we used.

Think about it, all you people who live in places with generally uninterrupted water supply.

Want to wash your hands? Cook pasta? Flush the toilet? Wash some plates and cups?

Think about it VERY HARD. Because each one of those drops of water has to be hauled up 9 flights of stairs.

Don't even think about showering or washing clothes. A quick wipe with a washcloth round the underarms and other stinky body parts might be possible; or rinsing out some item of clothing that's absolutely necessary to wear. But all those drops of water should definitely be recycled once or twice more within the apartment before you let them go. (Last stop for all pre-used, "grey" water: flushing out the toilets.)

It seems that in Riverbend's home they don't have access to a well. But people there with the wherewithal can buy bottled water. So roughly similar limits on total usage would apply. (And then, what about the huge number of people without the cash to buy bottled water on the "open market"?)

What I learned in Lebanon was that, for urbanized people living through a civil war, it's "relatively" easy to find go-arounds to deal with a lack of electricity.. You can find gas lanterns, kerosene heaters, camping stoves, burn charcoal, etc. (Oops, maybe no kerosene in Iraq today.)

But water? That's absolutely impossible to do without; and a severe shortage of water affects your quality of life far more than a similarly severe shortage of electricity.

Riverbend's conclusion rings quite true for me:

We've given up on democracy, security and even electricity. Just bring back the water.

I should add, of course, that the degraded hygiene conditions brought about by denied access to clean water also, in many cases, leads to the otherwise quite avoidable deaths of infants and other vulnerable individuals from disease.

That's right: in addition to making you feel absolutely miserable, a lack of access to water kills people.

And Allawi's hoping to "win" this election?? I don't think so.

Willing no more!

One essential tenet of "news management", US government-style, is that the administration tries to release news that makes it look bad fairly late on a Friday evening...

So tonight, this, from Reuters:

The White House has scrapped its list of Iraq allies known as the 45-member "coalition of the willing," which Washington used to back its argument that the 2003 invasion was a multilateral action, an official said on Friday.

The senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the White House replaced the coalition list with a smaller roster of 28 countries with troops in Iraq sometime after the June transfer of power to an interim Iraqi government.

The official could not say when or why the administration did away with the list of the coalition of the willing.

The coalition, unveiled on the eve of the invasion, consisted of 30 countries that publicly offered support for the United States and another 15 that did not want to be named as part of the group.

Former coalition member Costa Rica withdrew last September under pressure from voters who opposed the government's decision to back the invasion.

On Friday, an organization from Iceland published a full-page advertisement in the New York Times calling for its country's withdrawal from the coalition and offering apologies for its support for U.S. policy.

I guess at one level I'm surprised that anyone even thought there still was a "coalition of the willing" any more-- or rather, that the concept still had enough credibility that anyone cared about it at all.

But this new "smaller roster of 28 countries with troops in Iraq" doesn't seem to have a name yet.

Any suggestions?

Haaretz looking at Palestine

Ha'Aretz has two interesting articles today on the Palestinian situation. One is an assessment of Abu Mazen's situation, written by Rob Malley and Hussein Agha. Rob worked on Palestinian-Israeli issues in the Clinton White House and Hussein has been a longtime advisor to the Palestinian leadership. They are both astute and experienced; but of course like everyone else they look at things almost exclusively from their own point of view.

I'll come back to their article later. First, though, I want to mention this piece, by Arnon Regular, that gives what I judge to be an unrealisticially "optimistic" gloss to the Hamas position paper I wrote about here, a couple of days ago.

Somewhat breathlessly, Regular reports that,

Hamas has distributed a document ... in which the organization, for the first time in its existence, unequivocally recognizes the 1967 borders ...

Not so fast there!

What the document in question actually expresses, in Article I-6, is this:

Commitment to the goal of dislodging the occupation, and the establishment of an independent, fully soveriegn Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem.

"Dislodging the occupation" is notably not the same thing as "recognizing the 1967 borders", for two reasons:

Firstly, the meaning of the term "occupation" is not spelled out there. There are plenty of Palestinians who believe that Israel's entire presence inside its pre-1967 borders constitutes an "occupation", just as much as its presence in the West Bank and Gaza. (Plus, under international law, certain significant chunks of pre-1967 Israel were not allocated to the Jewish state in the 1947 Partition Plan and are therefore not unequivocally regarded as "Israel's".)

For the Hamas leaders to use the term "occupation", without specifying "occupation of 1967", leaves the extent of the occupation that they seek to dislodge still ambiguous.

Secondly, regardless of the extent of the "occupation" they seek to dislodge, they are notably not saying that that is the end of their demands. What they say still leaves open the possibility of them having a "two-stage" approach...

I think it's important to clarify these points. The Hamas document is significant, both for its existence as a first, publicly available clear statement of their current position and proposals, and for a number of points of its actual content. Including (but not limited to) Article I-6. What they say in Art. I-6 certainly leaves open the possibility of them settling for a two-state outcome. And that is new and significant.

But what it does not do, at this point, is commit Hamas to accepting the existence of Israel within its pre-1967 borders, or indeed, any stated borders at all.

I think it's very important not to over-interpret the advances this document represents. To do so would be to lead to disappointment and accusations of betrayal of trust when, sometime down the pike, Hamas leaders might well say, "Oh no, we never agreed to the existence of Israel inside the 1967 borders."

It's also important to read their statement as near as one can to the way they wrote it. These are people for whom the power and impact of every single word is very carefully chosen. One cannot understand them well or deal with them effectively if one does not read what they are saying.

Having said all of which, what they did say was still extremely significant.

And now, to the Agha-Malley article:

In the second part of their piece they write of Abu Mazen (whom both know well):

Abu Mazen enjoys a power that is at once nearly absolute and likely temporary. Unburdened by the need to cater to every constituency, his margin of maneuver is remarkably broad. But should the prevailing mood change, the U.S. fail to pressure Israel, or Israel fail to respond, the consensus that has swiftly formed around him will just as quickly evaporate.

...

Among potential landmines, two lie immediately ahead. The first is Israel's disengagement from Gaza. This is not something he can oppose: Land is being turned over to Palestinians and, for the first time in the history of the conflict, settlements are to be evacuated. Gaza, free of Israel's presence, can be rebuilt and serve as a model for the rest of the occupied territories. But it also is something he cannot afford to warmly embrace: Many of his people fear that with all eyes fixed on Gaza, the withdrawal there will be accompanied by a greater thickening of settlement blocs inside the West Bank, more Israeli construction in the strategic area of Jerusalem and continued building of the separation fence, all part of a suspected broader plan to impose long-term, de facto borders that will divide the West Bank into cantons. Balancing between these two considerations, Abu Mazen is likely to praise the Gaza withdrawal as an achievement that is part of the road map, keeping any coordination with the Israelis to a minimum and keeping the bulk of international attention on the West Bank. [I agree with that assessment ~HC]

The second landmine is one he knows to be in the offing: an Israeli proposal to establish a Palestinian state with interim borders in Gaza and parts of the West Bank. Eager for a political achievement, and obsessed with the imperative of institution-building, the United States and Europe are likely to press for his approval. Even some Arab countries, desperate for stability and for any sign of progress, can be expected to join the chorus. But what some see as an Israeli concession, Abu Mazen sees as a trap, an attempt to defuse the conflict, deprive it of its emotional power, reduce it to a simple and manageable border dispute, and defer a comprehensive settlement. He will strive to find a way neither to alienate important international backers nor break faith with his own deep-seated conviction that the proposal is a ruse - though how he can do both, at this point, even he does not know.

...

Over time, the fundamental challenge will be whether he can reconcile the numerous expectations he now embodies and channel the somewhat lukewarm backing he enjoys from often competing groups into active support for himself and his policies. In this sense, the election results both overestimate and underestimate his strength: The more than 60 percent who voted for him did not all endorse his platform, and the more than 30 percent who did not vote for him do not make up a coherent, unified, and effective opposition.

There are, too, a series of unanswered questions. What will happen if Abu Mazen cannot deliver what the U.S. and Israel require, and what will happen if Bush and Sharon do not produce what Abu Mazen needs? What if Abu Mazen is unable to reach a deal with Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Fatah militants, or if he reaches a deal but it does not hold, or if it holds but Israel continues its military attacks? What if the fragile political consensus around him breaks down or if violent infighting breaks out?

During his ephemeral tenure as prime minister in 2003, at a time when he enjoyed the support of the United States, the help of the United Nations, of Europe, and of much of the Arab world, we asked why, in the midst of such a crowd, he felt so lonely. He operated then without popular support, with substantial opposition, and in the shadow of a founding and interloping father. A year a half later, the father is no more and every significant Palestinian constituency now looks to Abu Mazen and relies on him. He has become the object of countless, often incompatible, desires. A protector and a savior, a transitional figure and a generation's last best hope, the devil they know for some and the lesser of all evils for others. To Palestinians, Abu Mazen has become all of these, all at once. It has become crowded out there, and isolated he certainly is no longer. As he looks upon what lies ahead, he at times must wonder where all his constituents have come from, how long they will stand by him, and what he has done to deserve their abundant and often cumbersome company.

I know Abu Mazen far less well than either Rob or Hussein (though for a lot longer than Rob has known him). But I would say that in these last few sentences they capture both the spirit of the man and the challenge of his work.

In particular, I think they capture the fact that Abu Mazen is not a "natural politician". He probably doesn't actually like most of the other Palestinian politicians with whom he has to deal-- or, many of their supporters. He is absolutely not "a man of the people".

Of course, the Palestinians are still reeling from having had one of those single-handedly at the helm ever since the assassination of Abu Iyad in 1991. Which is why, for now, they seem generally agreed on giving this quiet, introverted, but visionary and highly principled man a chance to succeed.

Let's see if the Bushies and the Israelis are also ready to do the same.

Inauguration Day, USA

Today, George W. Bush was (re-)inaugurated as US President, having won the election by 58 million votes to 55 million, last November.

I did not travel to Washington DC to join the celebrations.

Nor, however, did I go to join the protest demostrations that were held there. I was busy here, helping my friend with her new baby (still cute as a button!) and trying to catch up on numerous things.

In the afternoon I went, as usual on a Thursday, to join our weekly anti-war demonstration here in Charlottesville, Virginia. There have been times when I've been 50% of the entire demonstration-- or even, for up to 20 minutes at a time, 100%. But no matter. It's still important to do it.

Anyway, today, there were eight or nine of us. And the drivers passing our corner there were very feisty. In response to my "Honk for Peace" sign, I got a lot of prolonged honk-honk-honks there. But also, more yells or gestures of clear disapproval than I've ever had before. Let's say, maybe four or five disapprovers this week, as against certainly 200-300 honks or waves of support.

Later, I went to a special "inauguration day event" that the C'ville Center for Peace and Justice had organized...

It was a "read-in" of the entire US Constitution, plus all its amendments.

It was snowing by then, but we had around 25-plus people there in the upstairs meeting room at the town's central public library. I found the read-in unexpectedly moving. I gained a vivid sense of those 70 or so old guys, back then in 1787, wrestling among themselves with all those issues of how to craft the foundational document for an entirely new country.

Yes, they were all propertied white guys. Enslaved people were counted (at a rate of "three-fifths" of a free white person) for purposes of census-taking, and therefore for some purposes of allocating representation among the states. But they were certainly not allowed to vote. Native Americans who were not taxed-- i.e. most of them, since most of their landed property had already been stolen from them-- were not enfranchised. Women were not. Neither, back then, were unpropertied white men.

Gradually, over time, each of those groups was slowly given the vote, through a series of amendments to the Constitution. I got a strong sense of people crafting a document that they knew would need to be amended in the future; and quietly and systematically providing the basis for those amendments. (Or maybe it wasn't so quiet there?)

It was a fine and stirring way to spend an evening. We all took turns with the reading. We had people with great Texas accents; several kinds of Virginia accent; Yankee accents; a couple of British accents; a Palestinian accent. We had a young lad about ten years old and definitely some people in their seventies.

Before we did the reading the director of our regional library system made a few remarks about the infringement that the USA Patriot Act, passed in October 2001, has made on the freedoms of the press and of expression, as spelled out in the 4th Amendment. He stayed to take part in the read-in.

I guess what I got from the whole evening was a strong reminder that being a US citizen is "about" something very different, and much more fundamental and long-lasting, than being a supporter of this or that political leader

The whole venture of US nation-building is one marked by numerous deep ethical flaws. But through it all, decent people have been trying-- however imperfectly-- to do the right thing. And there are plenty of Americans still trying to do that. Most of us, in fact. It's just that we don't agree on how to go forward; and the ossified, dysfunctional political-party system here certainly doesn't help us to think through the issues.

An announced deadline for a US withdrawal: pro or con?

Once again today, Juan Cole is agonizing over the "pros and cons"-- for, I assume, the Iraqis?-- of the US setting a firm deadline for the withdrawal of their forces from Iraq.

(Sorry I can't give a link as he doesn't seem to have one. Oh, now I can. Here it is.)

I think it's very important to challenge the points he puts in his "con" column. It's equally important, in addition to merely fixing a "target date" for a withdrawal, to spell out the kind and speed of withdrawal we're talking about. I strongly believe that what is needed is one that is total, speedily executed, orderly, and as "generous" to the Iraqis as possible.

But first, back to Juan's points. Basically, he adduces three arguments against setting a withdrawal deadline that he seems to find very plausible. In fact, he finds them so plausible that he ends up advocating a withdrawal that is considerably less than "total".

Namely, he writes,

One solution ... might be to set a timetable for withdrawal of Coalition land forces, but for the US and its allies to continue to offer the new Iraqi government's army close air support in any battles with the neo-Baathists and jihadis...

Considerably short of a "total" withdrawal, indeed.

He does not, of course, even get into the thorny questions of who would actually command those air assets. What if the US should make such an "offer" of close air support--or perhaps, air operations much more 'untethered' than close air support-- in a future Fallujah- or Mosul-type situation... and the Iraqi "government" should dare to turn down that very generous "offer"?

Would the Iraqi PM's office be the US bombers' next target?

But first, let's back up a little and re-examine some of Juan's arguments against setting a fixed withdrawal deadline. As I said, they are three:

(1) "a precipitous withdrawal of coalition troops could lead to the total breakdown of security and give the guerrilla insurgents the run of Iraq."

(2) "in colonial situations setting a firm deadline for withdrawal beforehand can be disastrous. The imperial power becomes a lame duck. Why should anyone care if they are arrested if they know the arresting officers will be gone in 6 months?"

(3) "such deadlines can encourage massive communal violence as ethnic groups jockey to take over as the imperial power departs."

The first of these arguments does not seem to me to have much prima facie credibility. The withdrawal could lead to a breakdown of security?? What on earth does he think the massive and very belligerent presence of the US forces in Iraq has led to over the past 18 months?

Yup. Precisely that: a widespread breakdown of public safety in the country and the exponential growth of the insurgent forces.

The second of Juan's arguments seems to have little general validity unless one is actually concerned with the ability of the occupying/colonial power to continue to exercize its coercive power effectively in the occupied country, which I am not. The Bush administration got itself into this mess in Iraq quite voluntarily and gratuitously. Why should any of the rest of us be concerned about its ability to continue to coerce (and, let's face it, detain, torture, and kill) Iraqis for even one additional moment beyond right now?

Indeed, one might mount a potent counter-argument: that it might well be necessary for this US administration to suffer some significant humiliation in Iraq in order to deter it from "recidivizing" and trying to mount another, similarly gratuitous "war of choice" against Iran or Syria in the months ahead.

However, I'm not a great believer in the power of punishment, even of those who commit actions of which I very strongly disapprove.

More to the point, I believe it is in the interests of the Iraqis thmselves to have the turnover from US occupation rule to truly sovereign, independent Iraqi rule be not just as speedy as possible but also as orderly as possible.

That's why I believe-- and I've argued here before-- that it's in the interests of the Iraqi people and their leadership (which I hope will soon be the Sistanist leadership) to negotiate and then help facilitate the total and speedy exit of US forces from their country, rather than to have it be a disorderly rout.

(These negotiations can, of course, be backed up by all kinds of peaceful mass actions from the Iraqi side, if necessary.)

A withdrawal that is as speedy and orderly as possible is in the interests of all parties. That's why I hope it can be achieved. I believe the Sistanists (or perhaps, more precisely, Ayatollah Sistani himself) are the ones most disposed to do this; and the Ayatollah is the person in the best position to win broad Iraqi compliance with-- and indeed, participation in-- such a policy.

And that brings me to the third argument that Juan tries to make, namely that the announcement of a withdrawal deadline in advance can itself help to provoke widespread inter-group violence in the lead-up to the deadline.

Here, once again today (as he has done before) he cites what happened in British India and in British Mandate Palestine under exactly those circumstances.

This is not a trivial thing to worry about. However, I believe the present circumstances are different in important ways from the cases he cites. I would also remind him that there are many, many more cases of decolonization in which the deadline was announced in advance and that announcement did not lead to widespread inter-group violence. Juan seems to be suffering from a sort of selective, "if it bleeds, it leads" syndrome there in his recounting of the history of decolonization.

In more recent times, you could look at the South Africans' withdrawal from Namibia, or Israel's 1984 withdrawal from a chunk of Lebanon as cases where the deadline was announced well in advance, and there were many fears expressed about the threat of post-withdrawal atrocities, but those fears proved in the event to have very little substance at all.

During Israel's later, May 2000 withdrawal from the rest of Lebanon, the date was not announced firmly in advance: the IDF just sort of snuck out of the country in the middle of the night. And even there, despite the many, many fears expressed beforehand of widespread anti-collaborator atrocities in the wake of the withdrawal-- nothing of the sort happened. (Even though the IDF and their local collaborators had exercized a really nasty reign of terror there for decades right up until then.)

... I think what was significant about the British withdrawals from both India and Palestine in 1947 and 1948 was that Britain was undertaking those withdrawals out of sheer and total imperial exhaustion. World War 2 had drained the British of any ability or desire to maintain a globe-circling empire. They just had to get the heck out of those two big commitments as quickly as they could. Various British bureaucrats did what they could to try to make the withdrawals as orderly as possible (or perhaps, to minimize the amount of disorder). But they had no imperial muscle or will to be able to do this.

In both places, focused, well-organized religious separatists (Jinnah in British India, Ben Gurion in Palestine) were able to force their agendas onto the situation. This led to the widespread violence-- conducted in both countries with the goal of effecting broad ethnic/religious "cleansing", which rapidly become reciprocal.

Of course, seeing a repeat of that in Iraq would mean yet another exacerbation and prolongation of the Iraqi people's suffering; and none of us, I think, wants to see that.

But the US is not a totally exhausted imperial power. It can still conduct meaningful negotiations and its forces have the resources and discipline to conduct an orderly withdrawal.

In Iraq, I admit, there is a still-unresolved issue of the Kurds' desire for their own, relatively ethnically pure "homeland". But I don't see the presence of the US forces in Iraq as making any contribution to managing Kurdish-Arab issue constructively. And certainly, it has made no contribution whatsoever--just the opposite-- to managing the Sunni-Shiite issue within the Arab areas of Iraq. In this latter case, indeed, all it has done is stir up Sunni-Shiite polarities and hostilities, and the sooner the US forces leave, the better.

Another more general point about the argument of "apres nous, la violence des groupes": This argument is adduced so many times by colonial and occupying powers that it should absolutely not be taken at face value.

One of the main things that colonial and "bad" occupying power powers do, indeed, in order to consolidate their hold on power is precisely to stir up ethnic and religious sensitivities, e.g., by trying to use members of "minority" groups as their local surrogates, or otherwise continuing to play the old colonial game of "divide and rule". (Just as Martin Indyk was urging the US to do in Iraq, back in April 2003).

Of course this happened in Iraq, too. Just look at the US's reliance on Iraqi Christians or Iraqi Kurds to do much of their dirty work for them.

But then, to turn round and say, "Oh my! Now there's no way can leave this country because if we do there might be an ethnic bloodbath" is an argument of exactly the same quality as that of the boy who murders his parents and then claims the mercy of the judge "because I am an orphan".

Juan, I can quite understand that because of your close familiarity with the situation in India and Pakistan, as well as with that in Israel/Palestine, you have special sensitivies about such a scenario. But I think you should also open yourself to the idea that in many, many cases the advance announcement of a withdrawal deadline has not itself contributed to inter-group tensions.

Anyway, the "solution" you advocate-- the "close air support" idea-- seems to me to be no solution at all. Certainly, I don't expect Ayatollah Sistani or any other Iraqi nationalist would consider that a "solution" to the problem of having US forces on their soil.

Which leaves us with the idea that the withdrawal should be total, and rapid-- and it might be "announced" or, possibly "unannounced" (like the Israelis in 2000).

Realistically, though, the size and geographical spread of the US forces means that there is no way of conducting a "steal away in the middle of the night" withdrawal. There has to be organization, timetables, and an announced deadline.

Can this be made to work through negotiations with an empowered Iraqi leader, in a way that does not lead to a bloodbath? Yes. That, surely, should be the focus, rather than making any plans for "close air support".

And then, an empowered Iraqi leader can surely find his own ways to deal with the many remaining problems inside his own country. That is, after all, what national sovereignty and independence is all about.

100,000 Iraqi deaths is not, it seems to me, a very plausible credential for any power to use to "prove" that it knows anything at all about helping to build a peaceful Iraq.

Internal politics in Palestine

Hamas did not give Abu Mazen anything of a honeymoon after his electoral win last week, but instead mounted (along with Jihad and the Aqsa Brigades) the operations at the Karnei crossing point, which killed six Israelis, including two truck drivers and four crossing-administrators. Then this week Hamas launched the attack against Shin Bet agents staffing a checkpoint deep inside Gaza, killing one of them.

But still, it seems the tide on both sides of the national divide there in Israel/Palestine is shifting toward the possibility of some de-escalation. Indeed, despite Sharon's big announcement of a decision last week that he would not open talks with Abu Mazen because of the Karnei attack, tonight there was a meeting at the Erez checkpoint between high-level security delegations from both sides.

Abu Mazen has thus far laid a lot of stress on "cleaning up the internal house" of intra-Palestinian politics. A very wise move indeed, given the (sometimes deadly) internal chaos that had over recent years increasingly become the norm in relations even inside Fateh-- and that had actually left Fateh with little time or energy to wage any kind of internal political battle against any other forces inside Palestinian society. (Let alone against Israel.)

Abu Mazen has also laid stress on resolving intra-Palestinian issues through negotiation and other peaceful means, rather than through force-- though force is certainly what the Israelis and Americans have been urging him to use against the militant forces inside Palestinian society.

My sense of what's happening in Palestinian politics right now is that most Palestinians are quite happy to see the schisms emerging inside Israeli society over the issue of the planned withdrawal from Gaza, and are fairly determined not to let similar schisms tear their own already very vulnerable society apart. I have to note that for all the many, many attempts the Israelis have made over the years to cultivate some form of a Buthelezi-like "third force" figure inside Palestinian society, they have never to this day succeeded in that.

(Anyone out there remember the name Mustafa Dudeen? He was the "great white hope" of the Begin administration, circa 1981.) Arafat, for his all his many, many flaws was never prepared to become a Palestinian Quisling-- despite all the vitriol that Edward Said launched his way (from the safety and comfort of Edward's perch at Columbia University). And Abu Mazen certainly is no Quisling, either.

Anyway, Abu Mazen's first job is to try to fashion some kind of a working administration out of the organizational chaos and anarchy he has inherited from Arafat. According to this piece from occupied Jerusalem in Thursday's Al-Hayat, Abu Mazen has said that, "the 'reform file' for the PA contains four principal headlines, which are the security organs, the administration, the economy, and the judiciary."

Well, that should all be heard as good news by democracy-lovers all around the world. It might also come as good news for Hamas, which has also-- just like Hizbullah in Lebanon-- taken increasingly in recent years to promoting its cause under the general banner of "good governance."

In recent days, Hamas reportedly presented a document to all the other Palestinian factions which was their suggested draft for a "Document of Palestinian Dignity", which basically lays out ground-rules for how they want the different Palestinian factions to relate to each other.

It's long on general principles and short on specific details, but one of the really significant things in it is the degree to which it avoids airy-fairy, specifically religious rhetoric or references and the degree to which it really does use the language of general good governance.

Look, for example, at numbers 4, 5, and 6 in the second part of their listing ("internal relations"):

4-- The undertaking of a complete operation to reform the Palestinian administrative and financial situation that guarantees the realization of justice, equality, transparency, and accountability from everyone, and the guaranteeing of the public finances and properties, and holding to account whoever worked to abuse his office, and accountability in public finances.

5-- Bringing about the rule of law and the complete independence of the judiciary and guarding this independence from attacks upon it, whatever side they come from, and the implementation of its [the judiciary's] decisions according to the policy of the separation of powers, and the transformation of all the organs of the Authority into institutions ruled by law, as a preparation for its transformation into the institutions of the state.

6-- Relying on elections to make all the Palestinian decisions; the support of elections and non-interference with them.

I think #5 is particularly significant. One of the things that happened in the 1990s was that the PA, under Yasser Arafat, caved to US and Israeli pressure to establish special "Security Courts" that flew quite in the face of any theory of the rule of law.

Anyway, I'm too tired to do much more thinking right now. I need to go and curl up with Sy Hersh's latest article on the Rumsfeld global power bid, which dropped on our doormat this afternoon.

Politics in Iraq and Palestine/Israel

Things are really starting to heat up in the election campaign in Iraq, while in Palestine and Israel there's a lot of complex "pre-negotiation" politics going on on both sides of the national divide.

In Iraq, at one level, there is of course the continuing campaign against the election, being waged violently by (mainly) Sunni Islamists (Salafists) and some former Baathists, but with a fairly high degree of popular support from a Sunni population stunned and upset by the violence that the US and the Allawists launched against Fallujah and a number of their other cities.

But in addition, there is evidently a mounting campaign within the group of leaders and political forces who are contesting the election: and primarily between Allawi and the Sistani-supported United Iraqi Alliance.

Allawi seemed to wake up pretty late to the fact that he needed to contest this election politically and not just thru the application of massive violence, which is what he tried to do (Baathist-style) thru the end of 2004.

Now, suddenly he's offering all kinds of goodies to the Iraqi people, including scholarships for their children to go abroad and study just about anything they want!

He also tried to tell the UIA people that they couldn't use Sistani's image on their election propaganda. But to no avail.

Then yesterday, Allawi's people announced that on election day no vehicles "except government vehicles" will be allowed to travel on Iraq's roads. Since there have also been many allegations that his people inside the transitional government that he heads have been abusing their positions in order to boost his election campaign, the travel ban strikes me as a very dangerous and unfair proposal, though it was announced on so-called "security" grounds.

So how are the UIA people and other contenders in the election supposed to conduct their election-day activities if they're not allowed to drive?

Where is the outrage over this issue in the US media?

Whoever can credibly claim "victory" in the Jan 30 election gets to do two things:

(1) lead the deliberations on the country's longterm constitution, and

(2) head another "interim" administration that will govern till the adoption of the new constitution and the holding of new elections under it-- both of which are supposed to happen by the end of 2005.

This person may also, certainly, demand the start of immediate negotiations with the US over the speedy and total withdrawal of US forces from the country and their replacement with something else.

If it is the UIA list that makes--and holds on to-- a claim of victory in the elections, this is very likely (but not certainly) what they will do. And Allawi? No doubt his US puppet masters would carve out a role for him post-Jan 30, as they have until now.

I make the point about about being able to "hold on to" a claim of victory in the January 30 elections, since it is extremely likely that, whichever of those two big contenders announces a "victory", that claim will be strongly contested by the other side. And given the chaotic circumstances of the whole election process, both outside and especially inside the country, no credible, independent observer will be in any position to "certify" the election as "free and fair", either way.

So if we have an election "result" that is immediately thereafter contested by the losing side-- in a situation that is already one of rampant insecurity inside the country-- what then?

I note here, too, that the opening of voting places in 14 other countries around the globe also complicates the issue, since (1) it allows many further opportunities for ballot-box stuffing, intimidation, etc etc., and (2) gathering and counting those votes-- which I believe is to be done in Amman?-- will take a number of crucial days beyond the gathering and counting of votes inside the country.

So expect those post-January 30 days to be ones of huge tension...

And then we get a winning list "announced". And then?

If it is an Allawi victory that's announced, I think we might expect a massive, Ukraine-style mobilization by Ayatollah Sistani's supporters, contesting that announcement; and if things drag on perhaps the building of a strategic alliance between them and big sectors of the Sunni community.

(And remember: in the recent past, whenever Ayatollah Sistani has urged people onto the streets they have gone out there in the hundreds of thousands... or, millions.)

It seems to me, too, that-- given the state of all credible opinion surveys conducted over the past few months-- an announcement of an Allawi "victory" would have a massive credibility problem from the get-go.

If it is a UIA victory that's announced, I don't expect Allawi to be a gracious "loser", either. In his case, though, he can command nothing like the kind of broad popular support that Sistani has. So instead of resorting to Ukraine-style mass action he might well react to the prospect of losing his present money-making opportunity (oops, sorry, make that "job") by using all kinds of dirty tricks. And perhaps--though not certainly-- with some support from Negroponte.

So anyway, in Iraq, I think the next important stage to watch is what happens after January 30.

In Israel/Palestine, meanwhile, Abu Mazen is trying to get his "internal house" in order, and so is Sharon. Today, al-Hayat has a really interesting story that includes the alleged text of the conditons that Hamas has presented Abu Mazen with.

I want to translate that and get it up here as soon as I can. But I have a busy day ahead. Including we have a new baby in our house! No blood relative of mine, but the son of a good friend who's a single mom. They're living in our basement apartment, and I've been helping the mom out quite a bit.

The baby was born four days ago. What a sweetheart! Heaven forbid that the US should still be locked in its present paradigm of arrogant militarism by the time this little cutie becomes an adult.

War's effects on communities (contd.)

Last Friday I wrote a post here about the remarkable study that two Croatian psychology professors conducted into what happened to cross-ethnic personal friendships in Vukovar under the pressure of war, violence, and mounting inter-group polarization.

I meant to mention there, once again, two extraordinary memoirs of life during civil wars that came out in the early 1990s. One was Beirut Fragments, by Palestinian writer Jean Said Makdisi, and the other The Balkan Express, by Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulic. Both these authors are female, and parents, and really gifted at conveying the terrible tensions and strains involved in trying to keep oneself sane and one's family intact, during the horrors and social and infrastructural breakdown that wars inflict on civilian societies.

War from the point of view of "targets", or "consumers", you might rightly say.

As opposed to, "war from the point of view of the armchair generals, or plucky young (male) officers", which is how people who've never actually experienced war inside their own societies generally get to "learn" about it.

If you want to read a review article I wrote about these two books, ways back in 1993, you can find it here. Here's how it starts:

An accident of history, really, that brought this nice young man, untested in foreign affairs, to the Presidency of the republic at a time when the United States is in a position of unequalled supremacy in world politics. Decisions that he makes -- on Bosnia, Somalia, Cambodia, wherever -- can rip apart the fabric of whole nations.

What does Bill Clinton know of war?

Forests of print have addressed this question, and enough electronic wizardry to boost a message to the edge of the universe. But that discourse was always dominated by men -- fighting men in uniforms, political men reading opinion polls, think tank men finetuning the game of grown-up bully-boys called 'deterrence'. But put all of these specialists together in a room, and the picture you get of this thing called "war" is still incomplete. Locked outside, but more deserving of entry than ever before, are people with a different view of war: those who are not its producers but, perforce, its consumers (and who thereby are consumed by it). Themselves products of two great developments of this century of ours -- the inclusion of massed civilian populations in the target sets of warriors, and the spread of mass education -- some of these civilian war-consumers can today describe war in a way that is more complete than any previous description. Especially the women among them.

Move over, Les Aspin. Move over, all you Clausewitz wannabes with your Rube Goldberg 'models' of this or that form of warfare. Move over, the warrior-poets of glory or of anguish. Make room for experts like these: Jean Said Makdisi, a college teacher and mother who chronicled 16 years of war in Lebanon in her 1990 book Beirut Fragments; and Slavenka Drakulic, a journalist and mother who chronicled the first year of the present Balkan wars in her book The Balkan Express; Fragments from the Other Side of War (1993).

These women might both have put into their titles a word, "fragments", that implies a tentativeness of experience or discourse. But each book builds an overwhelming, thoughtful, and undeniably true picture of what war does to societies at the end of our century.

Never mind the generals. Compared with these women, what does Bill Clinton know of war?

Or indeed, I would add today-- even four years into his presidency-- What does George W. Bush really know of war?

Martin Luther King, Jr., on war

It's a public holiday here today in the United States: the official "birthday" of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the great civil rights leader who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and was assassinated in 1968.

If Dr. King had not been killed, he would have turned 85 on January 15.

Throughout the mid-1980s, I remember my two elder kids, who attended a public elementary school in Washington, DC, would every year, just before the holiday, start bringing home worksheets with an image of Dr King to color. And endlessly, they would study Dr. King's most famous oration: the "I have a dream" speech that he delivered from the Lincoln Memorial during the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

If you've never read the whole text, it's definitely worth doing so. Near the end, he mounts to a rhetorical crescendo with this theme:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."

... I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream...

I'm not quite sure what President Bush is planning to do today to mark Dr. King's birthday. What I'd like him to do is take out a tape-player and listen very carefully indeed to another of Dr. King's great orations: the sermon titled variously "Beyond Vietnam-- A Time to Break the Silence" , or more simply, "Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam". This one was delivered in April 1967, at a meeting at Riverside Church in New York City.

Through that link there, you can apparently even download an MP3 audio version of the sermon. It is certainly worth listening to. Dr. King was great and powerful preacher. But if you can't read or listen to the whole of the sermon, at least spend a little time pondering two portions of it.

The first is his response to those working alongside him in the civil rights movement who argued that coming out openly against the war in Vietnam could well divert the national focus from the civil rights struggle and harm that struggle in other ways as well. His response was this:

Tonight... I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans.

Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years, especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, "What about Vietnam?" They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a civil rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957, when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:

O, yes, I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath --
America will be!

Now it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read "Vietnam." It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that "America will be" are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964. And I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize was also a commission, a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for the brotherhood of man. This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances.

But even if it were not present, I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me, the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the Good News was meant for all men -- for communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?

Finally, as I try to explain for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place, I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood. Because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned, especially for His suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them. This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation, for those it calls "enemy," for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the ideologies of the Liberation Front, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.

Hallelujah! Amen!

At the end of the sermon, Dr. King offered a prescient forecast of the future and a simple but powerful prescription for what the US could and should do to radically de-escalate the conflict in Vietnam:

If we [that is, the US government]continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately, the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible, clumsy, and deadly game we have decided to play. The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war.

I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:

• Number one: End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.
  
  
• Number two: Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.
  
  
• Three: Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos.
  
  
• Four: Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and any future Vietnam government.
  
  
• Five: Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement. [sustained applause ]

Part of our ongoing [applause continues], part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country if necessary. Meanwhile [applause], meanwhile, we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices and our lives if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative method of protest possible.

It took a further eight years before the last US soldiers pulled hurriedly out of Vietnam. Along the way there, there were the additional, terrible brutalities of the "Vietnamization" program, and the massive, totally atrocious US bombings of Cambodia (which devastated much of Cambodian society and prepared the ground for the mega-atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge.)

When the US did pull its forces totally out of Vietnam, it did not do so in the generous, humble spirit of "atoning for" past sins and errors that Dr. King had urged, but in the angry, small-minded spirit of a grade-school bully walking defeated out of a schoolyard. There were none of the "reparations" that Dr. King had called for. Instead, for nearly 20 years after 1975, successive US governments sought to "punish" Vietnam even further for the fact that its people had humiliated the US military by maintaining a vindictive economic santions regime on the whole population of the country.

Of course, I have been reading/hearing Dr. King's words on the topic of Vietnam with the situation in Iraq front and central in my own mind. Most of the five policy-prescription points that he offered have direct relevance for Iraq today.

I hope that after January 30, there will be a (sufficiently) fairly elected, and therefore duly constituted, Iraqi leadership with which the US can negotiate the speedy and complete exit of US forces from the country.

Al-Hayat reporting on Iraqi elections

I'm just quickly working my way through the top of an article in Sunday's Al-Hayat (Jan. 16th). It's titled, "The fear of a Sunni boycott hangs over the election campaign and the 'Ansar al-Sunna' is responsible for the kidnaping of 15 Guardsman [ING]".

The dateline is, "Baghdad, Abu Dhabi, London, Al-Hayat" Here's the top of the piece:

The fear of a Sunni boycott of the Iraqi elections hangs over the information campaigns that the candidates have launched. And while the Minister of the Economy and member of SCIRI Adel Abdel-Mahdi stressed that the participation of 40-50 percent of the Sunnis is enough to make the elections legitimate, Ahmad Chalabi said that, "A handful of terrorists will not prevent the Iraqis from voting." And the former National Security Advisor Muwaffaq Rubaiee stressed that, "There is no goal to establish an Islamic state along Iranian lines."

And Saudi Arabia and the UAE, in a joint communique issued at the end of the visit of the [Saudi] second deputy prime minister, and Minister of defense and Aircraft, Prince Sultan ibn Abdel-Aziz to Abu Dhabi,expressed their hope that all Iraqis would take part in the political process.

On the security front, the 'Army of the Ansar [partisans] of the Sunna' announced its responsibility for the kidnapping of 15 members of the National Guard; and 17 bodies were discovered south of Baghdad; and meanwhile an American helicopter was damaged during clashes with armed men in Mosul, but no casualties have been announced.

In Baghdad, the parties and [political] forces intensified their electoral activities, and the head of the 'Constitutional Monarchy Movement', Sharif Ali bin al-Hussein, toured a number of schools while the Prime Minister Iyad Allawi visited Tikrit; and speakers for the 'United Iraqi Alliance' list which is supported by the Shiite Marja Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani held a press conference, under a large picture of the Shiite Marja Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani: the speakers included the leader of the National Congress, Ahmad Chalabi, and the leader of SCIRI, Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, and the head of the Daawa Party, Ibrahim Jaafari...

Just before I post this and run off, I note that a couple of days ago Allawi had announced that no-one should use "religious symbols" in their campaigning-- and that, yes, indeed, that included pictures of religious figures like Sistani. So I guess he does not get to control everything in this election, after all..

Friendships ripped by ethnic war

I wrote here, on Wednesday, about my disappointment in one chapter of My Neighbor, My enemy, the book I've been reading about "justice and community" in the aftermath of atrocious violence in Rwanda and former-Yugoslavia. I've now finished the book, and want to set the record straight by saying that the book as a whole-- bar that one chapter (Ch.10) which had some serious methodological flaws in it, as I'd described-- is a really fascinating read and a great contribution to human understanding.

Chapter 14, "Trust and betrayal in war" by two Croatian psychology profs, Dean Ajdukovic and Dinka Corkalo, is outstanding; and Ch. 12 is pretty good, too.

What I love about Ajdukovoc and Corkalo's work is the granularity of their descriptions and the deep sense of humanity that informs the whole chapter.

What they did was, using a "snowball sampling" method in the deeply troubled Croatian city of Vukovar, they conducted in-depth interviews with 48 long-time residents of the city, from both the ethnic-Serbian and the ethnic-Croatian communities there. Their interviewees had to have a couple of characteristics in common: they had to be people who had once had friends from the 'other' ethnic group, and they had to have had the experience that these relationships had been severed or seriously threatened since the terrible fighting that engulfed the city in 1991. The interviews were carried out in 2002.

The material they present in this chapter is achingly sad, and illustrates in vivid detail what can happen once the frenzy of violence takes hold of a place...

The interviewers started by asking participants to describe the quality of their social interactions across the ethnic "divide" prior to the onset of violence in 1990. "Typically," they write, in those days, "people either did not know the ethnic background of their friends, peers, or neighbors, or else they simply did not care."(pp.288-9)

According to A&C's account of what happened, things started to change in the city in 1990, after elections throughout the former Yugoslavia brought to power strongly "nationalist" parties. I don't know what the proportion of ethnic Serbs in Vukovar was, but pretty high. They had (or developed) their own militia; and tensions started to build up between this militia and the "national" (i.e. ethnic Croatian) police... For several months there in 1991, the Croatian police and army were harassing the city's ethnic Serbs pretty badly... And then, big units of the (ethnic Serb) Yugoslav National Army came thundering in from neighboring Serbia to exact a terrible revenge...

The authors give some heart-wrenching descriptions of how those events impacted on the lives of ordinary Serbs and Croats from the city who until then had been the best of friends. Tellingly, they write:

As ethnic relations deteriorated in Vukovar, many residents realized something was terribly wrong in their community and among their closest friends. Even so, they never discussed these perceptions with their friends from the other ethnic group; they felt that discussing such issues would only make matters worse."(p.291)

One thing that happened quite a lot was that, as the tensions started to build up, Serbs from the city would leave-- going to find a haven with relatives or friends inside Serbia, or elsewhere. Many of them left rapidly, in fear, and failed to even tell their longtime Croatian friends they were leaving. When, at some point after that, the Serbian military came in and visited terrible atrocities on the city's ethnic Croats, many of them suspected that their former Serbian neighbors and friends, "must have known" what was about to happen, and had gotten out-- but they had failed to warn their former Croatian friends of the disaster that was heading their way.

As a result, many of those Croats had a deep sense that their former Serbian friends had betrayed them, totally.

Many of the Serbs, meanwhile, nursed a deep sense of hurt that earlier, when they had been vulnerable to the Croatian police and military, their Croatian friends had done little to stick up for them...

And then, after the guns fell silent and many of Vukovar's longtime Serbian and Croatian residents started coming back to the city and encountering each other, many of them found it very hard indeed to reconnect with former friends. People would turn their face away when they saw a one-time friend on the street; or be distant. In general, a coldness often settled in:

Petar, a 37-year-old Serb driver, explained: "Some [Croats who have returned to Vukovar] turn their heads away when they see us. This happened to me once, and I was very hurt... " Veljko, a Serb teacher, kept asking himself why his Croat friends held him responsible for actions during the war for which only a fraction of the Serb people were reponsible...

Zdenka, an unemployed Croat in her late 40s, explained that she would very much like to see her friend Dragica but was afraid that she would become very emotional:


Whenever I think about her, I cry. I'm afraid to show how important she is to me, and how sorry I am because I don't know how she feels toward me. Perhaps she does not care about me...

(pp.295-6)

A&C sum it up like this:

Distrust and betrayal have paralyzed ethnic relations in Vukovar... The Croats want their Serb friends to acknowledge their suffering, to show some remorse for past crimes committed in their name, and to help them reveal the truth about their missing family members. On the other side are the Serbs, who are disappointed that their former Croat friends could even think that they would betray them... They maintain that they personally harmed no one and could not possibly know the fate of the missing. They see no reason to show remorse or apologize for crimes they never committed, much less seek forgiveness. Unfortunately, one of the few issues on which both Croats and Serbs agree is one that hardly bodes well for the prospects of reconciliation in the city: namely, that those who suffered great personal losses are entitled to show strong resentment to the other ethnic group.(p.299)

Well, I've just picked out a few strands from that richly presented chapter. It breaks my heart, because it shows in such detail how that inter-group mistrust took hold in a context of externally fomented war-- and how hard it has been since then, to transform those relationships back into something healthy and fruitful.

I saw that same process of inter-group polarization taking place in Lebanon in the 1970s. And I fear that just the same process is well underway inside Iraq today.

Where oh where are the leaders there to put forth an inclusive, transformative vision that ends and preferably also reverses the present process of inter-group polarization?

(Parenthetically, I note that that kind of detailed social psychological observation-- almost, an ethnographic approach-- used by those two authors seems much better suited to exploring the terrible phenomena of inter-group breakdown than the jejune quantitative kinds of approach that predominated at the conference on "Why Neighbors Kill" that I went to at the University of Western Ontario, last May.)

... One of the other chapters in the present book that I've really enjoyed has been Ch. 12, "Confronting the past in Rwandan schools", by a collective of nine authors-- four apparently American and five apparently Rwandan. This chapter tackles head on the issue that I was writing about here on Wednesday: the fact that it's very difficult to do useful research--or, indeed, many other things-- in a situation in which the very mention of "the H word" and "the T word" is generally forbidden.

The authors write:

Discussions of ethnicity in Rwanda are extraordinarily complex, since official government policy denies its existence in the country. This policy, promulgated by a powerful central government, may explain why several participants [in their interviews, focus groups, etc] refused to acknowledge their ethnicity... (p.256)

Anyway, the whole of that chapter is interesting and thought-provoking.

I am, however, struck by the persistence of US researchers who continue to insist on applying their own quite constructed category "ethnicity" for an inter-group distinction inside Rwanda that many Rwandans actually understand in a variety of different ways.

As I understand it, US social scientists more or less invented the category "ethnicity" to apply to a certain kind of social group for which-- certainly, when I was growing up in England-- we would much more frequently use the term "race" for. As in, "The British are a proud island race"; or "Italians, as a race, love to eat pasta and drink red wine", or whatever.

In the US, however, "race" has nearly always been construed along strictly skin-color lines. Understandable, perhaps, given the US's long involvement in the practice of holding and trading most dark-complected people as slaves, i.e. "property".

In European discourse, the term "nationality" has also often been used to denote the kind of social group for which US social scientists nowadays use the term "ethnicity". There are all kinds of references in European literature to "the national problem", or "Stalin's nationalities policy", or whatever.

But again, for US social scientists, they couldn't use that term either, since "nationality" had, for them, come to be so closely associated with-- indeed, to be dependent on-- the concept of citizenship. In the US, the idea went, a "new nation" [of US citizens] was being boldly formed. That "nation" could not, therefore, itself, be plagued, with "nationalities problems" inside it...

But then, there arose all kinds of issues around the arrival in the US of many south or east European immigrants... These folks were not, in US terms, considered to be "blacks", so they were members of the "white race"; but at the same time they seemed observably distinct from the north European immigrants who had dominated the settler society here before their arrival. And thus was born the concept of "ethnicity"...

So most Americans all think they know pretty well what they mean when they talk about "ethnic problems" or "ethnic differences", or whatever. Which makes it all the more surprising that they insist on using the term "ethnicity" to denote the distinction between Hutus and Tutsis in a place like Rwanda.

In my writing, I have tried wherever possible to refer to it as a "caste" distinction, since this is what it seems much more like, to me.

Hutus and Tutsis have basically the same whole range of ethnological practices; they speak the same language; eat the same foods; follow the same spectrum of belief systems; adhere to the same social norms; etc etc. It was just that "Tutsi" was traditionally the term for a family that was more cattle-rich, and "Hutu" a term for cattle-poorer folks who therefore had to do more land cultivation. (And the small "Twa" group were forest-based hunter-gatherers.)

I am not sure what exact difference it makes to try to take the Hutu-Tutsi divide out of the "box" of being considered an "ethnic" distinction. But it strikes me that--in the US understanding of the concept of ethnicity, at least-- it is something that is (a) relatively immutable and (b) not a category that someone should be ashamed of using. (In fact, just the opposite: in US thinking, people should be "proud" of their "ethnic heritage".)

"Caste" however is very different, on both those points.

Can anyone in the modern world actually defend caste systems?

Well, I guess I'll have to think about all this a whole bunch more. I was interested, though, that the writers of that chapter wrote there that several participants in their survey "refused to acknowledge their ethnicity", as though describing oneself as "a Hutu" or "a Tutsi" would be a quite normal, even admirable, thing to do-- like proudly describing oneself as "a Polish-American", or "an Irish-American", or whatever. Even, perhaps, showing a reluctance to state (or, "acknowledge") one's own ethnic "heritage" could be seen as somehow a fishy, or slightly suspicious thing to do?

In addition, the verb "acknowledge" connotes that there is one single fact there, on whose veracity everyone would agree, that ought to be "acknowledged". Why didn't the authors simply-- and more neutrally-- write that several participants "refused to state their identity"?

The mega-theme of this book, however (and this is probably the context in which I'll cite it the most in my upcoming chapters on post-atrocity policies) is that the holding of criminal tribunals in the aftermath of atrocities seems to have done very little-- in either Rwanda or former Yugoslavia-- to help reconcile the formerly warring groups, and indeed may well have perpetuated the inter-group polarities.

Here's what authors Eric Stover and Harvey M. Weinstein write in their concluding chapter:

First, our studies suggest that there is no direct link between criminal trials (international, national, and local/traditional) and reconciliation, although it is possible this could change over time. In fact we found criminal trials-- and especially those of local perpetrators-- often divided small multi-ethnic communities by causing further suspicion and fear...

Second, for survivors of ethnic war and genocide the idea of "justice" encompasses more than criminal trials and the ex cathedra pronouncements of foreign judges in The Hague and Arusha. It means returning stolen property; locating and identifying the bodies of the missing; capturing and trying all war criminals... ;securing reparations and apologies; leading lives devoid of fear; securing meaningful jobs; providing their children with good schools and teachers; and helping those traumatized by atrocities to recover...(pp.323-4)

All, very important conclusions indeed.

I am so glad Stover, Weinstein, and their colleagues have done all this work. They've done a wealth of broad social-science research that provides a lot of solid data that fleshes out arguments I've been making, on the basis of my own more modest researches, for some time now.

In a couple of weeks I'm going to New York, to take part in a really interesting-looking conference the U.N. University is organizing precisely on issues of post-atrocity policies. My presentation there is just about ready. I'll be encountering a lot of the "big guns" from the "war crimes trials for all" brigade. Hopefully, though, my little plea for a much greater focus--by the UN and by everyone else--on restorative-justice approaches rather than retributive approaches (or, as I call them, "western ethno-justice" approaches)-- will get a little bit of a hearing.

What I have, in spades, is the data on ontogeny and costs of policies, cost-effectiveness of policies, and some descriptive material on effects of policies. What these guys add is a wealth of detailed social-science data from Rwanda and former Yugoslavia. Great work!

CSM column on democratization

Here is the column I have in today's Christian Science Monitor.

It's titled (not by me) "Democracy-- after the vote" and tries to make the point that a commitment to "democracy" involves a lot more than simply sponsoring the holding of a single, (perhaps) technically fair, nationwide election. What I argue there is,

It is uncertain whether Iraq's vote can be held as scheduled, given the breadth of the insurgency. But even if it is held, neither that election nor the one in Palestine will assure the rights of the voters unless Iraqis and Palestinians also rapidly win their national independence. In addition, during the process of transferring sovereignty, the US (and Israel) need to convey - and also model - two of the key "big ideas" behind any true theory of democracy: the need to resolve differences through discussion, rather than violence; and a complete respect for the rights of others, including - crucially - those with whom we disagree.

If the Palestinians and Iraqis do not speedily win national independence, then elections held to "interim" bodies will have little meaning. But worse, democracy itself can get a bad name...

I think it is extremely important to continue making the case that democracy necessarily involves a commitment to resolving differences through discussion and negotiation, rather than violence, in every way that we can.

I have been horrified that the idea that "democracy" can sometimes be delivered on the tip of a cruise missile, or through the heft of a 1,000-pound bomb, has gained any currency at all within the United States. Let alone, that even so many people in the political center in this country seem to think that it's a distinctly plausible, even a laudable, idea.

I guess that this may be related in good part to two factors:

(1) The fact that so few participants in elite-level political discourse actually have any firsthand experience at all-- or even much engrained folk memory-- of what it's like to live inside a country that has itself become a "target" of war. This is something I definitely want to write more about in the near future, given my own distinctly different experiences of having grown up in an England still badly scarred from two World Wars, and of having spent six years living, working, and trying to raise young kids within a Lebanon that was certainly, back then, a country massively ravaged by war.

(2) The distinct, if somewhat abstract, attractiveness of (a certain framing of) the post-WW-2 reconstruction experience in Germany and Japan. Looked at in hindsight, by Americans, it has seemed plausible for many of them to argue that it was the war that allowed the restructuring of those two societies along democratic, more or less tolerant lines...

This last point is also worth discussing a lot more. I just note here that, (a) Neither the US nor any of the other Allies entered the war with the goal of fashioning Germany and Japan as democracies. That outcome was, if anything, a collateral benefit of the hard-won Allied victory; (b) The costs of that war to all participants were enormous. Definitely not the kinds of costs any responsible leadership should lightly think of incurring; (c) The democratization of both Japan and Germany took a lot of time, effort, commitment, and investment.

As longtime JWN readers all know, I was against the launching of the invasion of Iraq all along. (As I was, earlier, against the anti-Serb war in Kosovo.) However, once the war against Iraq had been-- despite the best efforts of all of us in the antiwar movement-- launched, and then after that won, there was still an opportunity for the US government to put into the post-war governance of Iraq the same kind of effort and commitment that 58 years earlier, it put into the administration and restructuring of Japan or Germany. So I set aside my previous criticisms of the launching of the war, and in what I hoped was a friendly fashion urged the Bushies to do the best they could to retrieve the best they could out of the problematic post-war situation in Iraq.

Once again they did not listen to me, or indeed to many people at all who have solid, concrete experience of Arab societies and/or the real requirements of post-war rebuilding...

But then, in addition, they went ahead and acted as though it was quite possible to "deliver" democracy by undertaking massively escalatory acts like the bombing of Fallujah.

The whole situation is tragic, just tragic. But I wish more people inside and outside the US would stand up and say clearly that a commitment to democracy involves a commitment to trying to resolve differences peacefully. If you don't have that commitment, then "democracy" is just a code-word for, "we support the establishment of a government that agrees with us."

No, friends, that ain't democracy at all.

How Casey's mom feels about the WMDs news

Cindy Sheehan, who lost her son Casey in the war and who left a comment on the Comments board here recently, just sent me the following letter:

Dear Friends,

Everyday there are fresh lies and fresh confirmation of the lies coming out of DC...I can tell you it is so hurtful to us families that more people aren't standing up to bring our children home from the lie and quaqmire that is Iraq...I feel like I should have a daily column called: Who lied today?

Bush told us that Iraq had WMD'S and they were getting ready to use them on us at any minute. Condi Rice told us that we should attack Iraq immediately...and don't let the "smoking gun" be a "mushroom cloud." Rumsfeld and Powell showed us where the weapons were buried...Guess what? THEY DIDN'T HAVE ANY WMD'S AND THEY WEREN'T GOING TO HAVE THEM FOR AT LEAST A DECADE. The United States was in no threat from Iraq...and Osama Bin Laden is free to plot against our troops in Iraq and against the innocent Iraqi people and Al Qaeda grows stronger every day because of our Administration's reckless, ignorant, and arrogant policies in Iraq.

Would it have hurt the Bushies and the rest of the war mongerers to wait a few months to confirm that Iraq HAD NO WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION before they pre-emptiviely attacked, invaded, and occupied a country that posed no credible threat to the USA? Would Casey, 1358 other brave Americans and thousands and thousands of Iraqis still be alive?...I think so and that is another stab in my heart and in my back.

Please write to your Congress Person and your Senators to stand up and do what is right...Barbara Boxer did it for the Ohio debacle....yes it is important that we have transparent and credible elections...BUT IT IS ALSO IMPORTANT TO BRING OUR TROOPS HOME FROM THIS NEEDLESS WAR. It is so important to support our troops by getting them the hell out of there....let Iraqis rebuild their own country...with money and supplies that we give them...bring the war profiteers home too and let the Iraqis have their jobs back.

Contacting the Congress

Love and Peace

Cindy

The trials of Rwanda

Filip Reyntjens, a very expert scholar of international law who is also an expert on Rwandan history, has now sent a letter to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda saying he will suspend all cooperation with the court's Office of the Prosecutor until it takes steps to indict members of the ruling Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) who are accused of human rights abuses.

Reyntjens, who teaches at the University of Antwerp, played an important role in the prosecution's work as recently as last September when he testified in the court against Theoneste Bagosora, accused of being the most important mastermind behind the nationwide organization of the 1994 genocide. (Reyntjens did, however, say in that tesgimony that Bagosora's co-accused, Gratien Kabiligi, had played no part in organizing the killings.)

According to the Fondation Hirondelle report linked to above, Reyntjens sent a letter to ICTR Chief prosecutor Hassan Jallow in which he wrote that,

failure by the ICTR to prosecute alleged perpetrators of the abuses was "meting out victor's justice" and risked becoming "part of the problem and not the solution".

He said that it was his knowledge that the "special investigative team" of the ICTR had gathered "compelling evidence on a number of massacres committed by the RPF in 1994".

"These crimes fall squarely within the mandate of the ICTR, they are well documented, testimonial and material proof is available, and the identity of RPF suspects is known", he wrote.

He added that that in not pursuing the RPF, the tribunal "fails to meet another stated objective, namely to 'contribute to the process of national reconciliation and the restoration and maintenance of peace'."

...

"While I remain committed to the cause which is at the heart of the mandate of the ICTR, on ethical grounds I cannot any longer be involved in this process. I shall, therefore, not be able to co-operate with the OTP unless and until the first RPF suspect is indicted", threatened the lawyer-cum-historian.

Reyntjens was one of the people I interviewed in connection with my Violence and its Legacies project, back in 2001. (You can read some excerpts from our conversation here.)

His reference to "contributing to national reconciliation" comes from the November 1994 Security Council resolution that established the ICTR.

I've been trying to get another bearing on the extent to which the ICTR has succeeded in that regard by doing more reading in the Stover and Weinstein book, "My neighbor, my enemy" that I wrote briefly about here on Sunday.

Though much of the book has been really interesting and helpful, I've been a little disappointed in Ch.10, which presents the results of a 2,000-respondent opinion survey carried out in four different areas of Rwanda in February 2002 in order to describe "Attitudes toward accountability and reconciliation in Rwanda."

One of my main problems with the design (and therefore, imho, the "reliability") of the survey is that-- in a country where the caste (or "ethnic") divide between Hutus and Tutsis is still extremely sensitive and important-- they report using a team of 26 Rwandan interviewers who were "nearly evenly divided in terms of ethnicity and gender."(p.208). This, in a situation in which some 85% of the respondents could-- if the sample is to be at all nationally representative-- be expected to be Hutus...

What I'm assuming is that the "workload" put on each of the 26 interviewers was roughly the same. (If the 50% of the interviewers who were Hutus conducted the roughly 85% of the interviews that would have been Hutus, then forget much of what I am about to write... ) But if roughly 50% of the respondents were dealt with by a Tutsi interviewer, then that means that a heck of a lot of Hutu respondents had exactly such an encounter.

So say you're a Hutu in a country where (1) the government is dominated by members of (a particular subset of) the Tutsi minority; (2) there is already a strong record of this government punishing anyone, of whatever social status, who tries to challenge it; and (3) this government very actively propagates an ideology that "we are all one nation; there is no meaning at all to the divisions [i.e. between Hutus and Tutsis] that the colonialists formerly used in order to divide the Rwandan people"...

And say that one day, a person who is--as just about every single Rwandan [but few non-Rwandans] would almost immediately be able to judge-- a Tutsi. And this person seems educated (= well-connected); has a clipboard; and starts asking all kinds of questions about you, your household income, your caste/ethnic self-identification, and your attitudes...

What on earth do you do?

Producing an exactly accurate articulation of the deepest feelings in your heart might not, I suggest, be your first or most major concern.

Note that what I am absolutely NOT saying here is that "All Rwandans are liars." What I am saying is that the kind of circumstances I've described above-- the arrival of the random, apparently "well-connected" visitor, quite possibly a Tutsi, bearing a clipboard, etc etc-- are not necessarily the best circumstances in which divination of people's true opinions could be expected to occur.

Heck, even if a given individual really wanted to speak the whole truth about her attitudes to the interviewer, she would still have her extensive responsibilities to her family and her community to bear in mind. It would not only be the individual survey respondent herself who might well suffer if she happened to give the "wrong" answer to the person with the clipboard (or tape-recorder, or whatever).

So what I'm suggesting is that many of the "results" of this survey would seem to me to be of very little value indeed.

At least in the broadly parallel opinion survey that other survey teams conducted in three targeted communities in former-Yugoslavia (Chs. 7 and 9), they made a point of reporting that they had used an interviewer of the same ethnicity as their Serb, Craotian, or Bosniak respondents in each case.

I can't believe that Timothy Longman, Phuong Pham, and Harvey M. Weinstein himself, who are listed as the authors of Ch.10, did not think that the caste/ethnicity of their interviewers might be an important factor to control for in Rwanda. I guess that, given the extreme difficulty of doing any research at all in Rwanda these days that involves asking respondents which of the country's three castes they belong to, the organizers of the survey didn't feel they could go as far as ensuring a caste "fit" within each interview encounter. They were probably, indeed, being pretty bold when they asked the important question about caste "self-identification" within the body of the survey.

Interestingly, from the 2,091 interviews they reported on, 12.7% of the respondents refused to provide an answer. 62.7% did self-identify as Hutus; 23.1% as Tutsis; and 1.3% as Twa (the country's very small, third caste grouping.)

Anyway, I've seen a few other, much less significant, aspects of the data presentation in that chapter that I also find a bit questionable. But this big issue of not even controlling for having a caste "fit" in each interview encounter-- plus, I might say, even more broadly, the general problem of trying to get "accurate" information about people's attitudes by using a standard public-opinion survey, in a country as authoritarian as Rwanda-- means that I don't actually think I'll use much of the info from this chapter at all.

What a pity.

In earlier chapters, the book has some interesting material drawn from focus-group discussions on post-genocide justice issues, inside Rwanda. That kind of material seems to me to be perhaps more reliable. Plus, the chapters on former-Yugoslavia seem more reliable and better grounded, in general.

Read MG again

Read Marine's Girl again, especially if you haven't read this post, that she put up at 11 a.m. Tuesday. It's a follow-on ICQ with her guy, from the one I linked to Monday.

Yesterday I was in Washington DC for the day. I have such strongly negative feelings about the policies that come out of that place, and their effects on ordinary people inside and (especially) outside the USA, that I almost have to force myself to go back there.

It turned out okay yesterday, because I was with some really, really nice people, doing wonderful things. Both in the afternoon, when I was discussing some possible professional projects, and in the evening when some dear friends from the 15 years I lived there hosted a small dinner for Bill and me.

I drove back home late last night. This morning I discovered a really nasty spam attack on the Comments boards here-- lots of really vile porn, all over many recent Comments boards. So this a.m. I had to spend more than an hour deleting all those comments.

It makes me wonder even more what the point of this blog is. I suppose increased clarity on this will come, sometime.

Anyway, I can tell you that MG's blog is truly a gift to the world. Lew, commenting here on the MG post I linked to on Monday, wrote, "I don't think it's real".

Lew, I think MG is as "real" as it gets. I've been reading her wonderful reflections on life, and her ICQ's with her guy, since ways before some really officious Marines Gunnery Sargeant harrassed her (on alleged "national security" grounds) into taking her whole blog down, back in November 2003. What was interesting then was that some higher ups in the Marines JAG division, or some other place relatively powerful like that within the Marines Corps, explicitly supported her right to continue doing just what she had been doing in the blogosphere. And so she has.

So please, all of you, if you have time, go on over to her blog and read the latest. (Why not leave her a nice comforting message there too, seeing as she's fighting her own battles with cancer??)

If you really don't have time to do that, at least be aware of this very important portion of her most recent ICQ record:

Marine: Any updates on getting me out of here? Me: I talked to our friend this morning and relayed the bit you asked me to. Marine: His response? Me: He wasn't very happy with what you said. I'm suppose to remind you that the program is still just being talked about Me: and he doesn't feel it will go ahead now that there has been so much negative talk about it. Marine: "Death Squads" should have never been brought up. That it was at all is a problem in itself. Me: I'm suppose to ask you why you are so against it. You can email me about it or cover it here and I'll send it along. Marine: Isn't he against it too? Me: I get the impression that he is although he didn't say explictedly either way. It was your saying you would go AWOL that seemed to upset him. Marine: I thought that might grab him. Marine: Back in late Summer of '03, I was pulled from my unit to teach martial arts and self defense to some Iraqi police recruits. Marine: It was a big waste of my time as they didn't want to pay attention and spent most of their time giggling at me. Marine: After these guys "graduated" most of them took the training, pay, uniforms, guns and equipment they were given and just melted back into the population. Marine: The ones that did stay on..I presume for a regular pay check are worthless and a danger to our people here because they can not be trusted. Marine: Now say we give some Iraqis "death squad" type training, will I have any insurance that they just won't turn around and use what I've taught them on some lady journalist or our other troops? Marine: No, there would be no insurance. I'd just have to trust them. I've learned from many examples that they can not be trusted. Marine: Any thing bad they did with that training would be on my conscious. Marine: THAT is why I would refuse to do that. My first class of teaching Iraqis, was my last. No more. Me: That's clear. Marine: If he needs any more than that, do copy the pages out of my journal from that time and send those along too. You have my permission to do so. Marine: Maybe I should have put it another way as using AWOL is pretty strong but it gets the message across loud and clear that I will have no part of that scheme. Marine: I'm pretty confident others would refuse too. Me: No worries, we should have you out of there before they put anything like that into action, IF they ever do. Marine: I'm not going to count on anything till I have discharge papers in hand.
Posted by Helena Cobban at 12:03 PM | Comments (3)

Read MG

Marine's Girl has a new post up. Read it. In case you haven't been reading her before now, just know that she's one heck of a feisty woman who lives with her son, Danny, in Michigan, while her fabulous boyfriend, who's a Marine, is in Iraq. She's having a tough battle with cancer, and indeed hasn't posted much in recent weeks because of the effects of the disease and her medications. She's been trying to get a discharge for her guy, so he can come back and help look after her.

So the latest post is the text of a long "ICQ" exchange they had....

Please support this conscientious objector

I got yet another email today from my friend Chuck Fager, who runs Quaker House in that hotbed of the US military culture, Fayetteville, NC. He's asking for our help. Mainly, but not only, letter-writing.

Here's what he writes:

Dear Friends--

Once again, we ask for your help in supporting a military Conscientious Objector, who is in jail for sticking to his beliefs.

The GI in question is a Marine, Joel Klimkewicz. He's been in the brig at Camp Lejeune, NC since mid-December. He's serving seven months for refusing an order to pick up a weapon. He's also being given a Bad Conduct Discharge, one of the military's worst punishments, usually reserved for serious felonies.

More background about Joel's case is below. I visited Joel in the brig on January 8, and found him in good spirits, and with visitors from his local Seventh Day Adventist (SDA) church. He's not alone. The national leadership of the SDA church is also working to have Joel's sentence cut short and get him out of jail. There has been press interest in Joel's case, and there may be more.

But Joel still needs help. His military paychecks have stopped, and he has a wife and daughter to support. The SDA church efforts to free him need public support.

After you've looked over the articles below, here's what you're asked to do:

Write TWO letters. One to Joel, at the brig. Address the other one to two Marine Generals: the Commandant, Michael W. Hagee; or the Commander of the Second Marine Division, Richard Huck. The addresses are below.

Thanks for your support -- and if this case speaks to you, please pass it on.

Peace,

Chuck Fager, Director
Quaker House, Fayetteville NC
910-323-3912
chuckfager@aol.com
www.quakerhouse.org

DETAILS

FAX numbers are included for the generals. In the letter to the generals, here are some points to mention about Joel Klimkewicz's case:

* Joel did not try to get out of the Marines. He only requested noncombatant status based on clear religious beliefs, which are supported by his church.

* Joel volunteered to go to Iraq and help clear mines, a very dangerous assignment.

* The Bad Conduct Discharge is excessive overkill -- it unfairly puts Joel in a category with robbers and rapists, when all he did was peacefully follow his religious beliefs.

* Such mistreatment of a sincere, loyal soldier is un-American, anti-religious, and brings discredit on the Marine Corps.

* Ask them to release Joel immediately AND upgrade his discharge to Honorable.

To increase the impact of your letter, send a copy to your member of Congress and/or US Senators with a cover note.

And to repeat: if this case speaks to you, pass this information on to others.

Friends and others have done a great job of showing support for military COs facing official persecution. As the apparently endless 'war on terror' goes on, here's a chance to do so again.

Joel's address:

Joel Klimkewicz
Bldg 1042 PSC 20140
Camp Lejeuene NC 28542

Marine Generals:

Marine Commandant Michael W. Hagee
CMC PA HQMC
3000 Marine Corps
Pentagon 4B548
Washington DC 20350-3000

FAX: 703-697-5362

Second Marine Division Commander
Richard Huck
CPAO Bldg 67
Camp Lejeune NC 28542

FAX: 910-451-5882

ARTICLES:

Detroit Free Press January 7, 2005

BRIAN DICKERSON: Punishment for Marine bears idiocy, from The Detroit Free Press, January 7, 2005

DARRYL Q. TUCKER, Newly Found Faith Lands Marine in Jail, from the Saginaw (Mchigan) News, December 31, 2004.

Please take a moment to do this if you can. It can make a real difference.

On the bookshelf

These past few days I've been transitioning back into working on my "Violence and its Legacies" project, a.k.a. my book about Africa, and my reading's been starting to reflect that. (Okay, apart from my near-mandatory lunch-time read of the WaPo "Style" section.)

First up here on my bookshelf, actually, something that has very little to do with Africa. It's Loving Without Giving In; Christian Responses to Terrorism & Tyranny by Ron Mock. Ron is a really nice person, a sharp thinker and a clear writer, who is also an Evangelical Quaker. That's a slightly "different" bunch of Quakers from my lot... Let's just say "his" lot defines themselves as specifically Christian Evangelicals. Ron was a member of our International Quaker Working Party on Israel and Palestine, and I really came to like him, and admire his drafting skills while we were working together there.

So his book attempts to give a "Christian pacifist" take on how Americans should respond to the challenge of terrorism, in particular. It's really great that he's published the book-- especially because he writes it, as far as I can see, from entirely within an Evangelical Christian viewpoint. He takes Christian scripture very seriously; tries to reconcile the differences between the writings of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament; and lays out very clearly the different ways that different kinds of Christians look at war-and-peace issues before plumping firmly for a Christian pacifist worldview.

But mainly what I like about the book is the clarity and simplicity of his exposition, and the deep psychological truth that I see in most of what he writes. He writes, for example, about the corrosive effect that a deep-seated sense of grievance has on the person who holds it, as well as on society in general. He writes about how hatred can lead people to dehumanize their enemies. And he pleads, throughout, for people experiencing a sense to vulnerability to continue to try to see "that of God" (as Quakers say) even in the people whom they fear the most.

Second up, a tome from the U.N. University called The UN Role in Promoting Democracy; Between ideals and Reality , edited by Edward Newman and Roland Rich. This one looks really interesting. It has some weighty theoretical chapters, which I'm still getting through. But then, it has case studies: Namibia, Cambodia, Kosovo, East Timor, and Afghanistan. Shameless empiricist that I am, I can't wait to get to the case studies. Maybe I'll skip one or two of the theoretical chapters...

And finally, for now, a book that I'm quite enthralled by, My Neighbor, My Enemy; Justice and Community in the Aftermath of Atrocity , edited by Eric Stover and Harvey M. Weinstein. (That's not Harvey Weinstein, half-owner of Miramax.)

This book is the fruit of a broad, multi-year project run out of UC Berkeley's Human Rights Center in which researchers looked at the effects on community mental health and attitudes of various steps taken to deal with the aftermath of atrocities in rwanda and former Yugoslavia. Well, my project is looking (in a slightly different way) at exactly that same issue in Rwanda-- but comparing it not with former Yugoslavia but with two other cases in southern Africa: South Africa and Mozambique...

But we're all looking at a large number of the same issues. And instead of having one dogged researcher perennially short of funds (me), their project apparently had whole teams of people doing various different kinds of social-science, human-rights, and community mental-health research in the two societies they studied.

The book is an impressive and fascinating production. I met Weinstein at a conference last year and really liked both him and his determinedly community-based (and quasi epidemiological) approach to issues of mental-wellbeing. Though the book does not deal explicitly with the kind of global policy issues I am looking at, the evidence it presents goes quite far toward challenging much of the "received wisdom" in the international community these days, i.e. that what people really "need" in the aftermath of widespread atrocity is some broad application of western ethno-justice. Indeed, it gives a lot of evidence that directly challenges the ideas that participating in a western-style court proceeding is necessarily therapeutic for individual survivors of atrocities, or that the work of such courts necessarily ever helps broader societiesthat are caught up in such violence to heal.

Right now, I'm in the middle of reading a great chapter titled, "Memory, identity, and community in Rwanda". Using survey data, focus groups, and other tools of social science it tries to critically assess the current Rwandan government's attempt to promulgate its own, highly structured and monolithic view of the histrocial antecedents of the 1994 genocide. The chapter includes this:

while most respondents were able to present an account of the government's narrative of Rwandan history, many also expressed skepticism about how history is interpreted and used by those in power. For example, a 50-year-old man in a Kibuya focus group said, after a long discussion of rwanda's history: "The reason for our preoccupation [with history] is that whoever achieves power wants to refashion the history of rwanda. There is no consensus and no national vision." In our survey, 49.2 percent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed with the statement "Whoever is in power rewrites rwandan history to serve their own interests," while only 21.7 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed." (pp.169-70)

Interesting stuff... Anyway, these last two books are great ways for me to get into my Africa project. I need to write the back third of my Africa book by about the end of March. Yikes!

Palestinian elections: pix from Ramallah Friends School

The Quakers have had two schools in Ramallah since the 1870s or so. There used to be one for the boys and one for the girls. But now one is used as an upper school and one as a lower school. Countless thousands of Palestinians-- Muslims, Christians (but very few Quakers)-- are graduates of the Ramallah Friends School. There is a small meeting (congregation) of Palestinian Quakers that grew up over the decades, around the school.

Anyway, I was cruising around the BBC site just now and found a lovely little photo essay from election day yesterday. It was all shot in RFS!

If you just want to see what a ballot paper looked like, go to image # 3 there.

Palestine/Israel: the work begins

So Abu Mazen won the Palestinian election No surprise whatsoever there. The turnout was down significantly from the last election, in 1996. (Actually, on the AP story I was reading, it said that Election Commission chief Hanna Nassir refused to release a final turnout figure.

Abbas obtained 62.32 percent of votes cast, streets ahead of his nearest rival Mustafa Barghuti, who won 19.8 percent.

And today, the Sharon-Peres version of a "unity government" in Israel just got sworn in, by 58 votes to 56 in the 120-member Knesset.

The government is committed to a platform mandating implementation of Sharon's year-old "disengagement" plan, that is, the complete or near-complete withdrawal from Gaza and the dismantling of four so-called "illegal" outposts in the northern West Bank.

Sharon had declared that he would treat today Knesset vote on the new government as a "confidence" vote, i.e., if 61 members voted against it he would resign. As it was, 13 Likud members voted against him and he was saved only by the last-minute decision of some small leftist parties to support him.

But what if Sharon had-- like Abbas-- gone to the general citizenry to test their support of his approach? The latest "Peace Index" survey of Israeli public opinion, put out by the Steinmetz Center at Tel Aviv University, reports that as of Dec 27-28,

the majority ... supports the disengagement plan (some 60%) and the minority ... opposes it (33%), with the rest (7%) having no position on the matter. It is important to note that the support for the plan continues despite, and apparently also because of, the prevalent view (67%) that the plan will constitute a first step toward a far-reaching evacuation of Jewish settlements in the West Bank in the framework of a permanent agreement with the Palestinian Authority... the view of the disengagement plan as less than final crosses the camps, and is held almost equally by voters for the parties that oppose the plan and for those that support it.

So we have some potentially constructive "raw material" to work with there, in peacemaking terms. We have just about 60% of the public on each side that seems to want to give the present leadership a chance to negotiate on the basis of the currently proposed plan, i.e., the disengagement plan.

On the Palestinian side, there is overwhelming support for going considerably further than the disengagement plan. But I would say a vote for Abbas would indicate a readiness to start the negotiations with what's now there, and then move rapidly forward from there. (Though their definition of "what's there" might actually be much more the Road Map, than the Sharon Plan.)

And on the Israeli side, we seem to have solid enough support for Sharon to push forward with own plan right now-- and roughly two-thirds of that 60% of the people who support his plan do so even though they are of the opinion that that is not "the end" of the withdrawals. Which makes a good basis of 40% of Israelis already ready, right now, to apparently go further than the Sharon Plan.

So, there may be some decent basis in public opinion to support both leaders proceeding in their pursuit of negotiations. That doesn't mean the peacemaking will be easy. Far from it. On the Israeli side, Sharon seems to face a strong "threat" (though I don't know if this is also a real "probability") of intra-Jewish civil war if he proceeds with his plan for a withdrawal from Gaza.

This is almost exactly the same kind of internecine conflict that successive Israeli governments tried to foist onto the Palestinian community just about ever since Oslo, with their insistence that the PA leadership "crack down hard" on Palestinian militants while at the same time they (the Israelis) gave Arafat pitifully few of the real political concessions that would have made his continued engagement in the negotiations much easier for them to "sell" at home.

So now looks as though it's Sharon who's going to have the toughest time figuring out what to do with the militants inside his own camp. In a way, of course, he deserves the grief of being the one to face down the extremist settlers. Ever since 1967, after all, he has been the Israeli leaders who has most consistently and most systematically defied international law and the weight of just about the whole international community by house by house, dunum by dunum, implanting the present total of some 450,000 Israeli settlers onto occupied Palestinian land. (That counts the ones in Greater East Jerusalem, as well as those elsewhere in the West Bank, and in Gaza. Many western news media simply refuse to count the East Jerusalem settlers as "settlers" at all.)

A big part of me says, fine, just let Sharon be the one who deals with the settlers; let him be the one who takes the heat.

Realistically, though, he's going to need considerable help-- and, most importantly, considerable counter-pressure on him-- from the international community if he's going to succeed in facing down these violent and hate-filled people who are the settler extremists, and in persuading even greater numbers of Israelis that the time for a real withdrawal from many additional settlements has now come.

How unbelievably unhelpful it was to the prospects for peace when, last April, President Bush gave the settlers the ultra-clear message that their extremism and militancy would be rewarded! That was when he stated publicly that:

In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines [that existed prior to 1967]"

That one declaration alone was just about enough to disqualify the US from having ever any part in "mediating" a Palestinian-Israeli peace that would have anything in common with the requirements of international law (or simple human decency.)

Oh well, I will keep an engaged but still deeply skeptcial eye on what happens in this negotiation over the months ahead. I haven't seen anyone yet with any power in the international community pressing for rapid conclusion of a final-status peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis, which I see as the only way of avoding everyone getting led down the same winding, futile, and demoralizing path of indeterminacy that bedeviled the whole Oslo experiment.

The theory of Oslo was always (as propounded by all the "peace processors" inside Israel and the US) that you "needed to build the slowly confidence between the parties before you even started negotiating the final peace." That was never the case in the history of diplomacy before then. Afterwards, the whole record of Oslo showed how the indeterminacy of the final outcome itself contributed massively to the sense of unease and general insecurity of each of the two sides. (This has also proven equally true in Kosovo since 1999, by the way. Just in general, it seems like a really lousy argument.)

So please, this time, no more going for "interim" arrangements. Everyone knows more or less what the outline of an acceptable-enough (on both sides) outcome would look like: something generally like the Geneva Accords. An outcome like that would involve many "painful concessions" by both sides-- concessions that is, from the maximalist positions staked out by the most militant members in each society.

So let's go straight for the agreement on the exact content of the "final outcome". Implementation of such an agreement can, as in any peace agreement, come in stages, by mutual agreement.

If we see the diplomats going for yet another "interim" arrangement, though, I think we'll all have to recognize that that will be death knell for any hope at all for a workable two-state solution.

(Bill the spouse said a number of the Israeli peaceniks he was with in Jerusalem last week expressed the view that Sharon's real preference is not the one-state solution, or the two-state solution, but-- the five-state solution! That is, one Israelis state, and four Palestinian Bantustans. Gosh almighty. What a true tragedy it would be if that really is what he has in mind. Didn't work for the Afrikaners. Won't work for Israel. Caused unbelievable grief and human suffering along the way.)

Sistani speaks to the Sunnis

On Friday, I wrote here that, " I would love to see [Sistani] or someone high up on the UIA list that he helped form making a really dramatic move to reach out to the Sunnis." Yesterday, it seems that a "source close to Sistani"-- and also, one dearly hopes, one expressly authorized by him-- was trying to do just that.

As reported and translated by Juan Cole today, this Sistanist source told al-Hayat yesterday that,

"The representation of our Sunni brethren in the coming government must be effective, regardless of the results of the elections."

I believe that the source may well have been using al-Hayat as a way to communicate with many Iraqi Sunni figures inside and outside the country. Hayat is Saudi owned, and is widely read throughout the Middle East.

I'm sure that Sistani has numerous other ways of communicating his point of view with selected Iraqi Sunni leaders as well. But to reach a broad array of Sunnis, inside and outside the country, using al-Hayat would be a sensible choice.

In what the Sistanist "source" (un-named) told al-Hayat, he also attempted a vigorous defense of Sistani's argument that the elections should not, at this point, be any further delayed beyond the presently scheduled Jan. 30 date. (This could also be a communication with Muqtada Sadr and others within the Shiite community who have started to argue openly for boycott or postponement.)

However, the source indicated that Sistani might yet change his mind on the no-postponement issue. In Cole's version:

" ... If Sistani became convinced that there was a likelihood of widespread fraud in the elections, he would not hesitate to urge that they be boycotted. But for the moment, he said, the alternative to elections seems to be chaos... "

Juan's translation of the article has a few elisions and what seem to me to be questionable renditions of the original. For example, in the immediately preceding quote, according to the Hayat original, the source was saying (HC version):

" ... and the Marjaiyah [the Shiite source of authority] could at any time issue a fatwa to boycott the elections in the event that it becomes convinced that they will see widespread [election] fraud. And the alternative to elections, as we see it, is chaos... "

I also went back to the original to try to gain a clearer idea of exactly what message it might have been that Sistani was trying to send to the Sunnis, and I came up with this translation, again slightly and, I think, non-trivially different from Juan's rendering of this section:

[Source:] " ...There is a [fixed] timetable and an international decision to create elected institutions charged with formulating the Constitution and empowered to demand that the occupation exit from Iraq, drawing on the popular legitimacy of these institutions."

And the source said, "The representation of our Sunni brothers in the future government must be effective, regardless of the results of the elections," stressing that this position, "is different from the American proposal to designate a quota for the Sunnis in the new majlis [constitutional assembly/ parliament]-- a proposal that our Sunni brothers rejected before the Shiites did." And he recalled that the Marjaiyah waged, "a bitter struggleto bring down the original American proposal that mandated the appointment [rather than election] of the Constitution-writing assembly...

The difference between my rendering and Juan's may not be large, but my reading of the Hayat original would seem to allow slightly more possibility of the Marjaiyah pursuing some kind of a formula for safeguarding the "effectiveness" of the Sunni representation than Juan's does. It makes clear (as Juan's does) that the source said that Sunni representation "must be effective, regardless of the results of the elections". The idea of exploring some reaching-out-to-the-Sunnis "formula" is perhaps being floated, right there. But then, according to the Hayat report, the source is notably NOT saying that Sistani in person (with all the authority that he represents) is opposed to the American proposal of a quota; the report has him, more calmly simply stating that the position he is articulating "is different from" the American proposal.

Well, I wonder what a possible reach-out-to the-Sunnis formula might look like? Especially if it is different from the Americans' "quota" proposal.... Here is one possibility: It is actually, I think, quite possible that Sistani could offer to take some additional Sunnis onto the UIA election list that he's put together. It is rather significant that neither the names of the people on the UIA list, nor, equally crucially the order in which these names are presented has yet been published. (The same is also true, I believe, for the rest of the lists that have been registered for the election. The reason given--and not an unreasonable one-- is the security of the candidates.)

So who would know-- or more crucially, who would object?-- if Sistani and his allies were to take some substantial additional Sunni figures onto their list and place them quite near the top? And-- here's something else important-- since none of this information about the names or positions of people on the lists is required to be made public, as far as I can see, even right up to the election-- they could even pull this maneuver at any time up to the point, after the election, when the UIA's number of seats gets announced and it gets to send those people to the new Assembly.

Well, that would certainly be somethng "different" from what the Americans have had in mind till now...

By the way, I just came across this post on a blog I haven't read before, called "Iraqi Comments".

It's written by someone who signs himself, in Arabic, as "al-Khafaji" and describes himself as "an Iraqi ex patriot". (I think he means "expatriate", which means he is still patriotic but living outside the homeland, rather than declaring himself to be no longer a patriot. As he says somewhere in a recent post, English is still hard for him. It is at least his third language.) He is a student now living in the Netherlands.

Anyway, citing no evidence at all, al-Khafaji presents what he describes as the five conditions on the basis of which the Bush administration is reportedly willing to negotiate a possible delay in the Iraqi elections. The first of these (reported) conditions is,

1. The Shi'ite authority, led by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, and Kurdish political leaders should announce unequivocally that they support the decision to postpone the polls. Washington does not want to antagonise its potential political allies, particularly Kurds and Shi'ites.

After listing the other conditions, al-Khafaji adds:

While there is no chance that these conditions are met by any side, the Allawi camp is urging it harder and harder day by day. He had the chance for several month to prove his abillities. By not doing so its obvious that he is not the man for the job. At least not a man to which significant part of the population will listen.

So, how are we to judge what this blogger wrote? What, at the end of the day, do we know about anyone whom we encounter in the blogosphere apart from what they disclose about themselves, which in this case is notably little. But he is probably well plugged in to all kinds of rumor mills churning away in the Iraqi expatriate community in Europe, at the very least...

And now, most recently, this, from AP's Rawya Rageh in Baghdad:

Iraq's most influential Sunni group will abandon its call for a boycott of Jan. 30 elections if the United States gives a timetable for withdrawing multinational forces, a spokesman for the group said Sunday.

Members of the powerful Association of Muslim Scholars relayed their request to a senior U.S. embassy official at a meeting Saturday, the Sunni official said on condition of anonymity...

Interesting. Lots of politicking going on. If only the folks in the Bush administration can become convinced that the best way forward in Iraq is more politics, much more politics, rather than more use of violence and bombing.

After all, if they have any kind of a learning curve at all they should have seen by now that-- far from "solving" any problems for them-- what they did in November in Fallujah has made the situation of the US forces in Iraq far, far worse.

JWN poetry corner-- # 1

I read this in The New Yorker, and was moved by it:

Now, when the waters are pressing mightily

by Yehuda Amichai

Now, when the waters are pressing mightily
on the walls of the dams,
now, when the white storks, returning,
are transformed in the middle of the firmament
into fleets of jet planes,
we will feel again how strong are the ribs
and how vigorous is the warm air in the lungs
and how much daring is needed to love on the exposed plain,
when the great dangers are arched above,
and how much love is required
to fill all the empty vessels
and the watches that stopped telling time,
and how much breath,
a whirlwind of breath,
to sing the small song of spring.

Translated from the Hebrew by Leon Wieseltier.

Palestinian election memorabilia

Bill the spouse is just back from Jerusalem. Yesterday he was in Hebron and Ramallah. He brought back some interesting Palestinian election materials. Like this, which is from a T-shirt:

That says: "On the path of Yasser Arafat". I'm afraid the part of it above-- which says simply "Vote for Abu Mazen"-- for some reason didn't scan.

Then we have this bumper sticker:

It says: "For the sake of bringing down the racist separation wall-- Let us vote for-- Doctor Mustafa Barghouthi."

Mustafa Barghouthi, in case you'd forgotten, is not the same as Marwan Barghouthi. the "radical" inside Fateh who decided not to run. Mustafa is a generally leftist physician who's the long-time head of the Medical Relief Committees in the occupied territories. He's a wonderfully smart and sincere guy who's a good organizer.

Finally, this flier:

It says: "So that we place the Cause in trustworthy hands!" (except it's better in Arabic, because it rhymes.)

Toward a change for the better... and the return of hope to the Palestinian people. Towards the future, with a struggling spirit;, on the path of dignity and pride, and the path of freedom, independence, and justice.

Let us vote for-- Doctor Mustafa Barghouthi

From a quick glance at Barghouthi's presentation of his bio inside the flier, I learned that he not only has a medical MD from Moscow, but also an "advanced degree" in philosophy-- plus, he has an MA in "organization building and development" from Stanford University.

I wonder if the ever-powerful Stanford graduates' network in DC is rooting for him?

Mainly, though, I wonder how everyone look back on these pieces of ephemera in the future.

By the way, Bill's report of how Hamas's members are reported to be swinging is that in Hebron, they probably won't vote at all, but in Gaza, a good number may vote for Barghouthi. This, in spite of his well-polished, generally "leftist" credentials. But since Hamas don't have their own candidate, if they want to register a strong protest against Abu Mazen, then supporting Barghouthi would be a good way to do that.

The "new order" for Afghanistan's children

I received a horribly disturbing email feed today from the IWPR, which has been doing some great reporting from Afghanistan. This report is titled, LIVES SHATTERED BY SEXUAL ABUSE; Authorities say that incidents of young boys being kidnapped and abused by commanders may actually be increasing, and it was reported by Wahidullah Noori from Mazar-e-Sharif.

I'll copy the whole text in beneath this, because it deserves very wide exposure.

After reading the email I went over to the Afghanistan section of the IWPR website to find a URL for this story, but it's not there yet-- (Ooops, it just went up there. Look here.) What I found there as well, from last week, was this story, on a disturbingly similar theme:

Daughters Sold to Settle Debts

Poppy growers say the government's anti-drug program is forcing them to surrender their children to drug dealers.

By Haytullah Gaheez in Jalalabad

I am almost beyond words.

Both pieces are very solidly reported and include some heart-rending interviews with some of the youngsters involved. In both cases, the reporters tried to get some reaction to their reporting, and some generally relevant policy statements, from local authorities and other opinion-makers in the cities they were reporting from.

Gaheez's story begins like this:

Zeva's eyes filled with tears as the 10-year-old's father took her by the arm and handed her over to the man from whom he had borrowed 50,000 afghanis, or about 1,000 US dollars.

"I cannot pay you in any other way. Take my daughter," said Gul Miran, 42, a farmer in Nangarhar province.

Like many other farmers in Afghanistan, Gul Miran had planned to pay back the loan with the proceeds from his crop of poppies... But as part of its stepped up effort to combat the drug trade in the country, the government had ploughed under his fields and Gul Miran was left with nothing.

"I accepted the girl in return for my loan," said Haji Naqibullah, who had advanced Gul Miran the money. "We had an agreement. He would [pay me back] regardless of whether his crops were wiped out by the weather or by the government.

"In a year or 18 months I will marry her off to my youngest son," he said.

Before I cut and paste the whole of Noori's story in here, I'll just note that IWPR does try to present a "balanced" offering of good-news and bad-news stories in the three-story collection it sends out each week. But honestly, I don't believe that a fluffy little piece about a 14-year-old Afghan girl who has made a new career as a film star can go anywhere near "balancing" the horrors reported in Noori's and Gaheez's stories.

For me, both stories raise immediate questions about the justifiability of a US-installed political situation there in Afghanistan that allows such things not only to happen but also-- as these reports clearly indicate-- to have gotten worse in recent months.

The idea of a government simply going in and plowing under the fields of poppy farmers without having made anything like appropriate provision for alternative livelihoods is almost unbelievable.

Okay, so here's the whole of the other story, the one on the abuse of young boys:

LIVES SHATTERED BY SEXUAL ABUSE

Authorities say that incidents of young boys being kidnapped and abused by
commanders may actually be increasing.

By Wahidullah Noori in Mazar-e-Sharif

The troubling practice of powerful commanders kidnapping and sexual abusing
young boys appears to be continuing in Afghanistan, despite efforts to build
a civil society.

And according to at least one expert in the field, the problem may be
getting worse.

Abdullah, 13, who lives at the Child Correction Centre, a facility run by
the justice ministry, told IWPR what it was like to be subjected to such
abuse.

"I was abducted about three months ago in Baghlan city," the youth said,
holding back tears.

"First I was held at command headquarters and later at the commander's
house. The conditions were barbaric.

"The first time he wanted to take me I fought back. But he was a giant with
great strong hands and tied my hands and feet before throwing himself at
me."

Abdullah says that, during the next few weeks, he was raped by 10 to 15 of
the commander's male relatives.

"I was tired and disgusted with my life and would have preferred death," he
said.

"One day when we were alone in the house I discovered his rifle. I shot him
dead and fled and took shelter with the older boys of the region," he said.
"They took me to the police and I have been [at the shelter] for one month."

There are currently 12 residents at the centre, all under 18, who have
either been abused or accused to crimes similar to Abdullah's.

Shafiqa, 17, is another resident at the facility.

"My brother was being kept for sex at the home of a commander in Baghlan
province," she said. "In order to win more favour with the commander, my
brother asked me to attend a party at the house.

"When I was there, I was raped by the commander's brother and now my family
doesn't want me at home."

Abdul Ghafoor Baseem, chief of Baghlan's human rights department, fears the
problem may be getting worse.

He said that in November he received 12 reports of child rape in the
province, a number he described as "unprecedented".

"This phenomenon, especially with gunmen being involved, is a very serious
threat to children," he said. "And the number of cases that go unreported
is unthinkable. We pass on some of these reports to the police but they
don't appear to be taking much action."

Baseem disagrees with the practice of placing abused children in amendment
centres.

"I feel that they could easily fall victims in the very places where they
should feel safe," he said. "The best way is for them to reunited with their
families and if their families are not prepared to take them back, then the
government must take care of them."

General General Faziluddin Alyar, security commander of Baghlan, confirmed
he had received reports about these crimes, and said he would undertake
investigations into the cases.

---

Wahidullah Noori is a freelance reporter based in Mazar-e-Sharif.

My thanks to Noori, Gaheez, and all their colleagues for their work.

Voting under the gun, revisited

Commenter "b" posted the following thought-provoking comment onto Tuesday's post here about the situation of holding elections "under the gun" of an occupying army:

One point about Palestinian elections this coming Sunday. Many Palestinians have been actually calling for such elections for a long time, knowing full well they would be held under occupation. But having no elections had allowed a corrupted political system to become entrenched. Those who favor elections now -- municipal, presidential and legislative -- see this as a chance to at least begin to put in place institutions that are responsive to those who live under the occupation. It's not a perfect setting for elections, but compared to Iraq there will be a very large international presence, the actual vote will probably be conducted by quite high standards of honesty, and there are at least two plausible candidates who represent different positions on key issues. So, for me, the clincher is that many Palestinians seem to want the elections even in these circumstance, and the alternative right now is not free elections free of occuaption, but no elections at all.

I agree with "b" on all his (or her) points, including: his (or her) empirical observation that many-- indeed, I would even say "nearly all"-- Palestinians have been calling for such elections for a long time, and for the reasons that "b" gives; the judgment that though the setting of the vote is far from perfect, its actual technical modalities will be pretty good; and the judgment that the important thing is that this election is what "many"-- or even "nearly all"-- Palestinians seem to want.

So that led me to ask the same kinds of questions about the Iraqi elections later this month. In particular:

1. How actually democratic are the technical modalities for these elections? and

2. How strong is the proportion of Iraqis that seem to want them to proceed even if the setting is very far from perfect and the modalities also imperfect?

As I've noted in other posts on JWN on both the elections in Afghanistan in October and the upcoming ones in Iraq (notably here ), what needs to be developed is a category of elections that are judged by members of the relevant national constituency to be "fair enough", rather than technically absolutely perfect elections.

The "fair enough" criterion is really important in a situation of recent or ongoing conflict, since it forecloses the possibility of ex-post-facto challenges to the outcome. Such challenges can be absorbed and handled in, for example, the US in 2000, or Ukraine more recently, because these countries have relatively stable national communities that are not on the point of bursting (back) into deadly civil conflict. Where you have countries that lack that kind of stability, contestation over the legitimacy of an upcoming or recent election can exacerbate the existing tensions and plunge a country back into civil war.

Significantly, the Palestinian community inside the OPTs currently seems to be moving toward increased rather than decreased internal cohesion. This is a good thing. And if the elections are contributing to that, that makes them good in my book-- even though I recognize that this cohesion is built on the basis of support for a general political/negotiating position that will not, in the short term, make the pursuit of peace negotiations any easier.

The very last thing the Palestinians need now is an internal civil war. Israelis who want a stable and lasting peace should realize that an intra-Palestinian civil war is certainly not in their interests either: "Divide and rule" may be a useful approach if what you want to do is maintain an empire, but it certainly doesn't help you to find a stable, well-based negotiating partner. (Rabin recognized that; I'm not sure that Sharon does.)

But back to the question of Iraq. What would constitute "fair enough" elections there? Looking at the two numbered criteria I listed above, I'd have to say:

(1) The technical modalities for the planned elections look fairly deeply flawed: the kinds of problems that Riverbend reported; the hasty cobbling together of the Iraqi Electoral Commission; the inability of the UN to get in and play any meaningful consultative/monitoring role, as it had originally been supposed to; the problems of the single-constituency system; the apparent lack of any ability for anyone-- political neutral Iraqis or foreign observers, to do any meaningful, nationwide monitoring of the campaign now and the election itself January 30; the rampant instability in many Iraqi provinces; etc etc.

(2) Regarding the degree of support for the process from inside the relevant constituency, even if it would be true to say that "a majority" of Iraqis want the election to proceed according to plan even despite-- or perhaps, in some cases, because of?-- its technical shortcomings, is this not a case where a simple majority vote on the legitimacy of the process is far from adequate?

In particular, given that this vote most likely will enshrine the handover of most of the effective levers of power inside the country from the previous, Sunni-dominated elite to one in which the majority Shiites have power more nearly proportional to their demographic weight, how can people expect the Sunnis to abide by its results if they roundly reject the legitimacy of the way the vote is being held?

The handover from a minority regime to a majority regime is certainly desirable from the democratic point of view. But it's not an easy thing to accomplish through the ballot box. The most notable place where it's been successfully done in recent times is South Africa. But I note that what happened there was a two-stage process very different from what we see in Iraq today:

Step 1: The National Party government, already engaged in negotiations with the ANC on the modalities of a handover to one-person-one-vote rule, went to the existing Whites-only voters and exlicitly asked for-- and won-- a clear mandate to complete this negotiation.

Step 2: The NP and the ANC completed their negotiation, and then sent the resulting agreement to a completely new voting list containing all adult South Africans, to win support for it (and also to name a Constitutional Assembly and new, democratic provincial governments).

Both those two elections were important in the South African transition. During the nationwide elections held at Step Two, there were some White hardliners who sought to disrupt the vote. But the "vast majority" of White South Africans resisted their call to do that, and agreed, some enthusiastically, others rather sullenly, to go along with the new order.

Very different from what is now happening-- and what may indeed continue to happen for some time-- inside Iraq.

I guess we have to conclude that Ayatollah Sistani is no Mandela. And there's no-one on the Sunni side to be Iraq's De Klerk.

I just hope I'm wrong about Sistani. I would love to see him or someone high up on the UIA list that he helped form making a really dramatic move to reach out to the Sunnis. Please God may it happen.

I also note that though my general theme here has been "elections held under the gun", the internal political situations in Palestine and Iraq are actually, and crucially, very different from each other.

A new day

I've been struggling with the Comments boards here on JWN for some time now. Yesterday, I felt I learned something new about what's been going on.

As someone who works hard to put my own thoughts into words on the main post, I have tended to feel a rather strong sense of attachment to the result and so to act excessively defensively when people jump in with comments that criticize it. And thus, by firing off my own defensively-motivated ripostes, I have actually been contributing to the "problem" I've been sensing, and struggling to define, on the Comments boards for some time now: namely, that some of the discussion there has developed a snarky, combative tone...

Which is not how I want the discussions on the Comments boards here to be, at all.

Acting defensively is never a good place to act from. Over the years I've come to see the great value of the Buddhist practice of "non-attachment to the fruits of one's labors." Basically what this teaches is that you do the very best you can on any particular particular project; and once it's done you let go of it.

(This teaching is particularly useful in parenting, I can tell you.)

So I started to think that the best way for me, and us all, not to get trapped in the problem of comment-board snarkiness is for me to do two things:

(1) Actively cultivate an attitude of "non-attachment" to the texts of my posts on the blog. It's an incredible blessing and privilege for me that I can have them out there! I must let them stand on their own. (Just like my kids.)

(2) Invest a bit of time in producing a "Mission statement" for the Comments boards here that will define "rules of the game" with which I and all other commenters here are all expected equally to comply.

I thank commenters Dutchmarbel and Dave for replying to the request I voiced earlier for links to similar sets of guidelines produced by other bloggers. It really is awesome to be able to network the energy and creativity of others in cyberspace so that each of us here doesn't have to reinvent the wheel each time!

As it turned out, it was the guidelines that Dave pointed me to that spoke most strongly to me as providing a good starting point for what I wanted to do. Dave's suggestion sent me to a blog called-- I kid you not-- "Real Live Preacher"; and I ended up really enjoying not just the post where the RLP laid out his hopes for his Comments boards and then set some gentle ground-rules for them, but also kicking around other areas of his blog as well.

It also got me to thinking that clearly, what I need to do on this blog is try to be a "Real Live Quaker". Well, I'm not entirely sure what-all that might entail. But I can tell you one thing it would rule out, and that would be me making snarky, combative comments on my own Comments boards here.

So firstly, I'd like to apologize to everyone to whom I made snarky or combative comments yesterday, or on previous posts. I take responsibility for, and am very sorry about, any hurt that I caused.

Secondly, I'd like to announce my intention that today we all of us start a new day on JWN. From here on forward, I get to post my posts (or perhaps, as I've done here before, texts from specially invited "guest posters"); and then afterwards we all try to abide by a single set of ground-rules that, I hope, will lead to a more courteous, friendly, and productive atmosphere there on the Comments boards.

And thirdly, I want to be quite clear that I strongly do not want the promulgation of these ground-rules to discourage anyone at all from posting their comments, including comments that express views very different from or critical of my own. On the contrary, I hope that general observance of these rules will lead to discussions on the boards that are less prickly and inhospitable, more generative of fresh and productive insights, and thus altogether more welcoming to potential participants than what we have sometimes seen previously.

I invite you all to join me in ushering in this new day here on JWN.

I invite you all-- and especially anyone who's planning to post a comment on any of the Comments boards here-- to take a couple of minutes to read the new guidelines. And then, when you've done so, to join me in trying in trying to honor them.

I've thought pretty hard about these points over the past week or so. But I'm sure that many of you readers also have thoughts on this issue that could make what I'm trying to do here more effective.

If you do, or if you have thoughts on "discourse guidelines" in general, please post those comments here!

Voting under the gun

It strikes me as a bizarre perversion of the ideals of democracy that people should be expected to cast votes-- and then to concur in the legitimacy of the leadership thus "chosen"-- if these election campaigns and the subsequent elections have been held in a situation of gross public insecurity.

But that is what the US and Israel are trying to sell as "democratization" these days.

In Iraq, back in late October, it was evident there were major political issues to be resolved between on the one hand the Sunni Arab minority in the country, and on the other the Shiite Arab majority, the Kurds, the Interim Government, and the Americans.

Many parties were pursuing negotiations of these issues at different levels. But the Americans and their Allawist allies simply walked away from those negotiations. They were adamant that they wanted to "solve" the Sunni issue by force... "in time to restore calm before the Jan. 30th elections".

Well, we've seen that they haven't "solved" anything. Their disastrous decision to "clean out" Fallujah has led only to highly increased levels of public insecurity throughout huge swathes of the country.

But still, Bush's spokesman tells us that the President remains adamant the elections will go ahead on time. This, despite the proliferation of reports that various figures in the interim government itself are floating the idea of a postponement...

You SHALL vote on the day ve tell you to! (How is that not gross foreign intervention in the country's internal affairs?)

(Go see what Riverbend wrote about the elections, last Sunday. She's heard you can sell a voter's card there for $400 already.)

But back to my main theme.

One of the major "meta-ideas" of democratic theory is that in a democratic community it is always possible to find ways to talk through differences and arrive at compromises between competing interests... How on earth did anyone think that the escalatory tactics the US military has pursued in particular since last October provided any kind of a "preparation" for democracy at all?

And then, there's Israel, another internally (though like the US, also problematically) democratic country that's running a heavyhanded military occupation in foreign territory... And over there, too, the indigenous people in the country under occupation have an election coming up...

There too, you might think that the occupying power, professing as it does an interest in seeing the strengthening of democracy among the people in the occupied areas, might have helped prepare the ground for the elections by trying to broker and lead a de-escalation during the election campaign...

Yeah, you might think that Sharon, if he were sincerely interested in showing that his government can be a plausible negotiating partner for a re-elected and relatively moderate Abu Mazen, would have ordered the IDF to hold back on some of their more aggressive tactics like "extra-judicial executions" (i.e., assassinations) of suspected militants...

That he might have asked the IDF command to tighten up on the Rules of Engagement, so as to avoid any gross "over-reaction" or other form of escalation?

Or, that he might even--gasp!-- have pulled the Israeli troops back out of the cities and allowed free circulation of candidates and politicians between the different Palestinian cities and towns?

You might have thought that. But no. It's been extra-judicial executions just about as usual, far as I can see, in the two months since Arafat's terminal illness, as before then.

B'tselem's count of deliberate, targeted assassinations undertaken by the IDF between 9/29/2000 and 11/30/2004 is 181 people killed by its snuff teams. And during those targeted killings, an additional 106 Palestinians were killed, 29 of them minors. Collateral damage, that's called.

It's hard even for the seasoned pros at B'tselem and the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for HUman Rights to keep up their counting of the tsunami of killings-- whether deliberate, collateral, or the result of excessive IDF violence-- that has been striking the shores of Palestine in recent months.

Including during all of their so-called election "campaign".

Just go to the PCHR's well-organized website and see what they've been reporting in recent weeks.

Just today, five todays before the Palestinian election, an IDF tank near Beit Lahiya, in Gaza, fired a shell at a group of minors, killing seven of them. Here are their names:

1. Hani Mohammed Kamel Ghaben, 17;
2. Mohammed Hassan Mousa Ghaben, 17;
3. Rajeh Ghassan Kamel Ghaben, 10;
4. Jaber 'Abdullah Ghaben, 16;
5. Bassam Kamel Mohammed Ghaben, 17;
6. Mahmoud Kamel Mohammed Ghaben, 12; and
7. Jibril 'Abdul Fattah al-Kaseeh, 16.

How on earth is this not an excessive use of force?

How on earth do they expect Abu Mazen not to harden his rhetoric as he tries to wage a campaign under these circumstances?

In the last two days of 2004, Occupation Force tanks raided Khan Yunis, in Gaza, killing five Palestinians, including a child and a mentally disabled civilian man.

How on earth is this not an excessive use of force?

Then, there have been the continued and even stepped-up closures. According to a PCHR press release today, the Rafah international crossing point between Gaza and Egypt has been kept closed by the Israelis since December 12th.:

Rafah crossing point is the only place which Palestinian civilians have access to the outside world. The closure of the crossing point has a serious and detrimental effect on the economic, social, cultural and political life in the Gaza Strip.

This in itself is a gross application of structural violence to stunt and stymie the lives of the Palestinians. But it will also affect the ability of the Palestinians to have a free and fair election even within the highly constrained system in which they are supposed to hold them. The PCHR press release says:

PCHR is particularly concerned at the effect which the closure will have on the upcoming Palestinian elections. The vast majority of those civilians, who are denied passage into Gaza Strip, are of voting age, in accordance with Palestinian law. Preventing them from crossing into the Gaza strip also deprives them of their right, granted under the Universal Declaration for Human Rights, to participate in the government of their country through elections.

PCHR believes that the act of closing Rafah international crossing point will disenfranchise around 3% of the total Gaza electorate.

The PCHR, by the way, is an exemplary human-rights organization with a trained and professional staff. They record not only the abuses committed by Israel, but also those committed by the PA and its affiliates, and those committed by Palestinians militants. You can find all of that on their site.

But what concerns me most in this post is the behavior of these two internally democratic, allegedly democracy-seeking occupying powers-- Israel and the US.

Looking at their behavior during the campaigns for this month's elections in both Iraq and Palestine, you have to conclude that these occupying powers have missed numerous opportunities for de-escalation in connection with the campaigns. Instead they continued, or even increased, their own recourse to escalatory violence.

You have to conclude, further, that what they're interested in in not so much the spread of true democracy, as the perpetuation of their own control.

It makes me want to weep. Such a fine ideal: "elections". But elections held directly under the occupiers' gun? I don't think that's acceptable, at all.

"The supreme international crime"

Excerpt from the Judgment of the Nuremberg Tribunal relating to "Count Two", the Crime of Aggression, as brought against Goering, Ribbentrop, and 14 other defendants:

The charges in the Indictment that the defendants planned and waged aggressive wars are charges of the utmost gravity. War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world.

To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

Nicholas J. S. Davies, a Contributing Writer over at Online Journal posted a generally well-argued piece there on December 31, in which he reviewed the history in international jurisprudence of the crime of initiating an aggressive war, and concluded that the US and British governments were guilty of such a crime in initiating the war against Iraq.

(Indeed, though Davies doesn't go specifically into this, the precedent of Nuremberg would also indicate that the relevant officers in these governments who made the decision to go to war, and those who prepared and planned for it, should be held personally responsible for the catastrophic consequences of those decisions.)

Davies starts off by explaining that, "war crimes fall into two classes: 1) war crimes relevant to battlefield conduct; and 2) waging a war of aggression." Strictly speaking, I think he has the nomenclature a little fuzzy there. "War crimes" as a term nowadays nearly always refers to crimes that are "grave breaches" of either the Geneva or Hague Conventions-- i.e., jus in bello crimes, or "crimes that are committed within the context of a broader war."

The big jus ad bellum crime, by contrast, is the crime of waging an unjustified war in the first place-- regardless of whether or not specific and smaller-order "war crimes" are committed within it. From that point of view, the portion of the Nuremberg judgment cited above is extremely important: the "crime of aggression" as it is sometimes called, or alternatively, a "crime against the peace", truly is,

the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

As I noted in this June 2004 JWN post,

Crimes against the peace, as used at Nuremberg, harked back to earlier, Wilsonian dreams of "outlawing" war, or at least, "unjust" wars. In the end, 16 defendants at Nuremberg were charged with it, and 12 were found guilty.

Interestingly, this category of crimes was not included on the docket sheet for either the ad-hoc tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) or its sister-court for Rwanda (ICTR). But it did subsequently surface in a shadowy form in the 1998 Rome Statute [for the International criminal Court, in the form of "the crime of aggression". However, [this] "crime" was evidently one that the negotiators at Rome found very hard to reach agreement on. As the Statute says, "The Court shall exercise jurisdiction over the crime of aggression once a provision is adopted in accordance with articles 121 and 123 defining the crime." That certainly hasn't happened yet!

So it is clear that no-one is about to be able to haul Bush, Blair, and their co-conspirators into any law-court and indict them for their launching of the war against Iraq.

But one's judgment on the legality of the original decision to launch the war is nonetheless important for how it colors one's views on what is happening and what needs to happen in Iraq today.

Firstly, though I have argued several times elsewhere that "foreign military occupation" is essentially a value-free technical term that simply describes what happens when, during a war, an army comes to be in control of territory that does not belong to it's country-- still, one's judgment regarding the legality of an occupation most certainly can be colored by one's judgment of the legitimacy of the military operation that brought it about. If a patently unjustifiable war is launched, then the occupation of foreign terrain that is run, as a result, by the war's initiator should certainly itself be viewed as a thoroughly illegitimate occupation, in itself.

And so, secondly, what should be "done" about this occupation?

Davies reaches the following conclusion:

as the aggressors in this conflict, the United States and the United Kingdom are ultimately responsible for "the accumulated evil of the whole."

Legitimacy is not something that can be conjured out of illegality by finding the right political or military strategy. International law actually requires us to end our offensive military operations, and to submit the crisis we have created to the U.N. Security Council without prejudice, not to win approval of a new American plan for Iraq, but so that we can withdraw our forces, Iraq can regain true sovereignty and the U.N. can offer its assistance as needed or requested by the Iraqis. The legitimate ongoing role of the United States in this process would be the payment of reparations to enable the Iraqi people to recover from the war and to rebuild their country.

I completely agree.

(Big thanks to Christiane for pointing me to Davies's article.)

... Though in general, Davies's piece is well argued, and I am really delighted that he has laid out the case so clearly there, he does, I think, fudge one other important definitional matter in addition to the issue of whether the "crime of aggression" can be subsumed under the title "war crime". This is where he seems to fail to understand the very important distinction between "preemptive" and "preventive" war.

He writes:

There is actually an internationally accepted standard in international law for "preventive" or "preemptive" military action, known as the Caroline case.

That case happened during an obscure, British-US battle conducted on the Niagara River in 1837; it involved the burning of a boat called the Caroline... Davies writes that the two sides resolved the dispute over the legality of the boat's burning by jointly agreeing to,

the principle that "Respect for the inviolable character of the territory of independent nations is the most essential foundation of civilization," and that this can only be legally overridden by "a necessity of self-defense, instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation," and "the act . . . must be limited by that necessity, and kept clearly within it."

This became the accepted international standard for "preemptive" military action, and was cited as such by the judges at Nuremberg using [U.S. Secretary of State Daniel] Webster's precise wording.

The first half of that principle is very important, and certainly also bears remembering well today. But the "Caroline standard" for justifiable pre-emption laid out in the second half is crucial. It is very clear and very tight: there must be a demonstrably imminent threat to the security of Nation A, stemming from the territory of Nation B, if A is to be able to claim that its "pre-emptive" initiation of war against B was justified.

That's the meaning of the word "pre-empt": you're about to strike me, but I "pre-empt that strike" by striking you first. There has to be a threat that is demonstrably there and demonstrably immediate that is what actually is pre-empted.

If you're not about to strike me but I strike you anyway, I am merely an aggressive bully.

In the case of the USUK war against Iraq, there was no such demonstrably imminent threat to the security of either the US or the UK. By no stretching of the criteria of the "Caroline standard" can that be said to have been the case.

What Bush-- for his part; I can't speak about Blair-- was doing in March 2003 was something significantly different: he was launching a "preventive war", not a "pre-emptive war", and it's important to keep that distinction clear.

The claimed justification for a "preventive war" is that just possibly, sometime in the future, Nation B might have both the ability and the intention to launch a strike against Nation A. So Nation A claims the right to get in there first-- ways first!-- and Nation B from ever being able to do that. None of that wussing around with waiting around until, literally, as per the caroline standard, there is "no moment for deliberation".

Indeed, a "preventive" war-- whether initiated by Hitler and his henchmen in the 1930s or 1940s, or by George Bush in 2003-- requires a tremendous amount of deliberation, just as it requires a tremendous amount of preparing, planning, maneuvering slyly toward, and just plain "spinning" along the way.

Although I am deeply opposed to the initiation and waging of all wars, I think it's really important to keep in mind the important distinction between preemptive war and preventive war. It was that distinction that, crucially, Bush's 'National Security Strategy' document of September 2002 sought to elide.

As here, in the text:

To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.

Actually, the argumentation leading up to that conclusion forms the crux of that whole very dangerous document, and is worth reading carefully:

For centuries, international law recognized that nations need not suffer an attack before they can lawfully take action to defend themselves against forces that present an imminent danger of attack. Legal scholars and international jurists often conditioned the legitimacy of preemption on the existence of an imminent threat -- most often a visible mobilization of armies, navies, and air forces preparing to attack.

We must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today's adversaries. Rogue states and terrorists do not seek to attack us using conventional means. They know such attacks would fail. Instead, they rely on acts of terrorism and, potentially, the use of weapons of mass destruction -- weapons that can be easily concealed and delivered covertly and without warning.

The targets of these attacks are our military forces and our civilian population, in direct violation of one of the principal norms of the law of warfare. As was demonstrated by the losses on September 11, 2001, mass civilian casualties is the specific objective of terrorists and these losses would be exponentially more severe if terrorists acquired and used weapons of mass destruction.

The United States has long maintained the option of preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security. The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction -- and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.

The United States will not use force in all cases to preempt emerging threats, nor should nations use preemption as a pretext for aggression. Yet in an age where the enemies of civilization openly and actively seek the world's most destructive technologies, the United States cannot remain idle while dangers gather.

Just look at that second sentence there: "Legal scholars and international jurists often conditioned the legitimacy of preemption on the existence of an imminent threat..." No, Mr. Bush, they didn't "often" do that, they always did it, at least from Daniel Webster on.

But you see how he tried to say, kinda, well it wasn't exactly such a strict standard as all that, ya know... so if we just tweak it a little bit further, no big deal, eh?

A weaseling argument if ever I saw one!

I'll just close where I started:

War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world.

To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is ... the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

1998 "Letter to an Israeli mother"

I just found the text of the "Letter to an Israeli Mother" that I originally published in the Arabic-language daily Al-Hayat at the end of July 1998. I referred to it in this post that I put up here yesterday.

The "Israeli mother" in question was one of the leaders of the Four Mothers movement, that in the three-year period 1997-2000 succeeded in bringing about a "virtually complete" Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon.

After Hayat published the Letter, I got a call from Ha'Aretz in Israel, who asked if they could publish it as well. Which they did, on August 14, 1998. That turned out rather strangely, since a substantial portion of the Letter was quoting from an earlier report in Ha'aretz... My intent in using those lengthy quotes had been to bring that interesting material to the attention of the Arab readers of Hayat. But I imagine the Ha'Aretz readers already knew it!

In 1998, Bibi Netanyahu was prime minister in Israel. At one level it all seems such a long time ago...

Some of the best quotes I used in the Letter came from 4Ms co-leader Irit Letzter. They came from a report of a meeting she and some of the others had had with a roomful of Israeli generals and high-ranking pols. She told them to their faces:

"We do not agree with the perspective that, 'I am a victim; I am threatened; everyone is against me; that's how it's been and that's how it will always be.' ... I seek courage in my leaders, not rigid thinking."

later, she went even further in challenging some of the country's weighty religious orthodoxies:

"When God said to Abraham, 'Please take your son, your only one, whom you love, Isaac,' Abraham did not argue. We believe that if God had approached Sarah, she would have replied, 'Forget it. I'm not sacrificing this child.' She would never have submissively accepted the order... I'm not naive, I don't bury my head in the sand, but I don't agree with the warped male notion that war is somehow a challenge, a project, heroic."

I am really sorry that the Four Mothers movement disbanded immediately after the IDF withdrew from Lebanon. After all, it's not as though that withdrawal ended all of Israel's conflicts with its neighbors... Far from it.

Does anyone know what became of Irit Letzter or any of those other Mothers? Or, of their sons?

Women getting WaPo-ed

Okay, readers, so what proportion of the wisdom of the human race do you think resides in the minds of the world's women?

Fifty percent, perhaps? That might be a pretty good first guess.

How about this: 9.2 percent? That, sadly, is the proportion of women's contributions to the Washington Post's Op-Ed pages over the past 14 days.

I started my "Women getting WaPo-ed" watch on December 21. In the two weeks since then, the once venerable "main" newspaper in the capital of the new global empire has published 65 signed Op-Ed pieces. Just five of those pieces had female authors. A further two pieces, each of them co-authored, were co-signed by a man and a woman: for those I assigned "0.5" as the proportion authored by a woman.

So, we have a total of 6 female authorial units out of 65: that is, 9.2 percent. Had we merely counted the names of all the authors, we'd have had 7 women's names there out of a total of 67: 10.5 percent.

So there we have the range. Presumably the editor of the WaPo's Op-Ed page, Fred Hiatt, thinks that somewhere between 9.2 percent and 10.5 percent of the world's wisdom resides in the minds of women?

Shame!!!

I have to tell you a couple more things, too...

One is that, though I wasn't counting so closely back then, I'm pretty sure the proportion was quite a lot higher than that back in the late 1980s... Back then, the "guys" who ran the Op-Ed pages of the major newspapers, along with their fellow "guys" who edited the major foreign-affairs mags in the USA, were all fairly concerned about trying to encourage women's voices and seeking out smart women to write on their pages. Those were, intellectually, much more interesting times. (But I was still trying to raise my kids while also pursuing my career. The "guys" whose careers were really taking off in those days all had wives at home to do that job for them. Which left the guys with plenty of time left over for after-hours schmoozing, brown-nosing, mentor scouting and propitiation, and general career-building... Lucky them!)

But then, after those relatively exciting years had passed, a sort of default, lazy "guy-dom" just set in again in the WaPo and other major institutions of intra-elite discourse. And you see where we're back to today regarding the presence of women's voices??

I should note here that I do realize I'm blessed to have my longstanding relationship with the CSM, which I certainly consider to be another institution of intra-elite discourse. But "major"? With what they pay me? You gotta be kidding! It was, however, founded by a woman and has always treated women staff members very seriously.

The other thing I should tell you is that on Christmas Day, the WaPo finally published a truncated version of my original "Letter to the Editor" regarding the nasty, sexist movie review of the week before.

Big thanks to all of you who sent supportive comments, or undertook helpful actions, in response to my earlier post on that issue. Here's how the letter finally appeared:

The Post's Boys Club

I was disgusted by this lead to a movie review in the Dec. 17 Style section: "The experience of 'House of Flying Daggers' isn't like going to a movie so much as going to a truly superb brothel. That is, pleasure is available in every room, in every configuration, in all possibilities, in polymorphic abandon."

It didn't take a genius to guess that the writer was a man. I assume the editors who signed off on such a simile must have been men, too. Who would have imagined The Post to be a snickering boys club where the writers fantasize about debasement through prostitution of women and girls (and perhaps young boys as well)?

-- Helena Cobban

Charlottesville

Better late than never, and better an edited version than nothing at all... I guess.

Well, now that my data regarding "Women getting WaPo-ed" is building up, I need to decide how to take it to the folks who run the paper there. I mean, maybe they just didn't know how bad things are...

Hizbullah: the discussion resumes

Okay. Commenter Dominic, who appealed my decision to close the Comments board on the recent Lebanon's Hizbullah post, wins. (At least, I think "appealing" was what you were doing, Dominic?)

I've now reopened that post to Comments. So feel free to go there and do that, anyone.

I really do value (nearly all of) the discussions people have on the Comments boards here, and think that most of them add a lot to the blog's value. But with that particular discussion, I just had a strong sense it was getting repetitive. I have an incipient short-term memory problem, so when I see there are new Comments on a post I generally have to scroll quickly all thru the preceding Comments to catch up with what has been going on. That discussion started to feel like a burden to me, what with the repetitiveness and then a slightly snarky reference to myself at the end.

One thing I promised to myself-- to help control my ever-threatening blog addiction-- is that "The moment doing the blog isn't fun, just stop." It felt like not fun there for a while.

Meanwhile, I'm sure you're all wondering how my mammoth task of writing a long article about Hizbullah has been going...

The answer is, I'm nearly at the end. I have a gargantuan draft. Nearly 14,000 words. Tonight I'll key in the last edits and send it off to Boston Review.

I am totally tired.

I tell y'all what I'd love. Does anyone know of a set of guidelines for comments-management policies on blogs that might be something I could adapt, adopt, post here, and use?

Texts of such policies, or links to same, on this Comments board please.

Continuation of the "Lebanon's Hizbullah" disscussion over there...

The power of mothers!!!!

I made a quick reference in a recent post here to the Israeli "Four Mothers" peace movement. This movement, founded by four mothers of Israeli soldiers serving in the IDF's occupation force in neighboring Lebanon, succeeded, in the years right after its founding in early 1997, in pushing the issue of a speedy Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, unilaterally if need be to the very top of the national agenda.

Two years later, in the Israeli general election of 1999, Ehud Barak adopted the idea of this withdrawal as one of his key election promises. He won the election handily. In May 2000, the IDF did finally withdraw from all (or very nearly all) of Lebanon, as promised. Many of those parts of Lebanon they had been in for 22 years by then.

That withdrawal was unilateral-- i.e., no negotiating its modalities with any other party. despite that, Israel's northern border with Lebanon has experienced an unprecedented level of stability ever since, to the delight of the people living both north and south of it.

To find out more about the 4Ms, check out the links on this portal, and then explore the whole of that site a little more. The 4Ms disbanded after the withdrawal.

Today, I read this piece in the NYT. It's G.I. families united in grief, but split by war, by Monica Davey. She's writing mainly about the moms but also about the other close family members of some of the 1,300 US service members killed in Iraq so far.

Davey writes that while all the moms have been thrown into deep grief by their losses, some of them have remained as strong believers in the essential rectitude of the conflict that killed their menfolk, while others have been driven by their bereavement into a much deeper questioning of the whole war effort. She writes in a very fair-minded way, representing the views of mothers on each side of this divide.

Here is one of them:

Karen Hilsendager, of Philomath, Ore., said she found herself struggling with her doubts about the war and what they meant for the death of her son, Specialist Eric S. McKinley, who was killed in June. Ms. Hilsendager said she was irked by a comment people often made about her son. "They tell me: 'Thank you so much for his service. He's a hero,' " she said. "And I want to say back, 'He's not a hero, he's a victim.' "

... Ms. Hilsendager said her feelings against the war were no blemish on her son, his service or his memory. "My son was following orders, and I'm proud of him for doing that," she said. "But I am not proud of the administration that sent them. They did it wrong. They should not have gone over there yet. I'm not saying never, but not this way."

Davey writes that while there is now a whole, loose, nationwide network of families who have lost loved ones in the war, many of the bereaved people tend to gravitate towards people who share their own interpretation of the broader meaning of their loss, and even have a hard time dealing with bereaved family members espousing the other point of view.

One example:

This fall, on a conference call of mothers who shared their experiences for a book project ("A Mother's Tears: Mothers Remember Their Sons Lost in Iraq," by Elliot Michael Gold) several hung up in anger after disagreeing about whether the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks had made the war in Iraq necessary.

(I'll be looking for that book, with great interest.)

Anyway, this got me to thinking once again about the huge power that mothers today have to do energetic work for good in our society. On a historical scale, it's quite amazing that a woman like me can be, okay, 52 years old; have raised three healthy, lovely, and productive children; not have died in childbirth; still have plenty to eat; have been blessed with a good education; and-- that I should should still have the energy and verve to work for another, say, 30 or so years in peace and justice movement!

What an amazing lessing!

I should note that I did play one teeny, teeny part in the Four Mothers movement. Sometime there, maybe 1999, in my regular column in the Arabic-language daily al-Hayat I wrote an "Open Letter to the Four Mothers from the Mother of a Lebanese". After Hayat ran it, I got a call from the Israeli daily Ha'Aretz who asked permission to run it in Hebrew in their Op-Ed column.

I said yes.

So okay, I don't know that it played any role at all. But actually, right now, I think I'll have to dive into the horrendous mess ironically known as "Helena's filing system" (hah!) and dig it out. Heck, I could even upload the text onto here if I succeed.

Anyway, my broader point here is that clearly we need to think about the potential power of a "Mother Building Bridges" movement or something, to help get the US occupation troops out of Iraq.

I am also, I should add, the owner of a small bank account in the name of a group called "Mothers and Others Connecting" that a group of us founded last year here in Charlottesville, to start selling Palestinian embroideries as a way of generating income for women in the refugee camps. I like the concept-- as well as the sound-- of "Mother and Others" (though so far we haven't had any non-mothers sign up onto out embroidery-project committee). But maybe our group would be prepared to license that concept to a broad, international group of "Mothers and Others Against the War"...

Ideas?