'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 p