I have decided to take down-- for now!-- the "Democracy Denied in Iraq" counter that has been a feature of the JWN sidebar for more than seven weeks now.
On this day, 88 days after the partially legitimate January 30 election in Iraq, UIA list head Ibrahim Jaafari has won approval from the elected National Assembly for his list for a transitional government.
I realize that the path to sovereign and democratic self-government in Iraq still looks extremely bumpy. (An under-statement, that.)
As that AP report states,
The historic decision also was made with a third of legislators in the 275-member National Assembly absent.
Prime Minister-designate Ibrahim al-Jaafari told reporters that decisions over the vacant and acting Cabinet positions will be made in three to four days.
I still have the HTML/script for the counter, however, and shall put it up at a moment's notice whenever I think it should go back up.
"Empires will tremble!" (as a good friend of mine once said with I think just a touch of irony when I told him the Quakers were about to bring out a report on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.)
A couple more significant details from the AP report:
Al-Jaafari himself will be acting defense minister, a position that was supposed to go to a Sunni Arab.
Ahmad Chalabi, a Shiite Arab and former Pentagon favorite, will be one of four deputy prime ministers and acting oil minister.[equals big cash-cow!!]
Anyway, regarding the constitutional discussions, I note that in a number of recent statements Ayatollah Sistani has been stressing that they are more important than the arrangements for "transitional" administration of the country. (H'mm, I'm not so sure about that. The country's transitional administrators have the capacity to wreak an awful lot more havoc on it if they do a bad job... Or, alternatively, to help lead it in a good, national-consensus-based direction...)
Anyway, given that so much time has now elapsed before the constitutional talks have even gotten started, there is even more reason then to drop the insistence that the entire, permanent Constitution needs to be agreed before the holding of elections to a permanent National Assembly. I urged that in my April 14 CSM column, and there was then an interesting discussion of the topic by comments on this JWN post.
The post I put up here Monday about Gallipoli has already started to generate one of the most interesting cross-cultural discussions I've ever seen in the blogosphere... It's definitely worth following the whole flow of the comments there.
Commenters include some fairly vocal Ozzies (oops, sorry, Aussies!) and Kiwis, not all of whom agree with each other-- or me!-- but all of whom are definitely eager to explain their points of view... a Singing Nun... the descendant of several Lebanese (or perhaps in those days they called themselves Syrians) who had been conscripted into the Ottoman Army and fought to defend the peninsula... and Yankeedoodle of Daily War News in unprecedented (for me) military historian cum "our roving correspondent" mode...
But that's not all. As I say, definitely worth a peruse.
Note: I want to keep all the Gallipoli discussion in one place-- over on that post, not here. So despite possible appearances to the contrary this post is closed to comments.
Yesterday, I noted here that Iraq's transitional President, Jalal Talabani, has a "security counsellor" called Wafiq al-Samarai.
Commenter "Badr" noted that the position should probably be translated as "national security advisor", and that "Wafiq al-Samarai was chief of military intelligence under Saddam and a leading opposition figure to the regime later."
Interesting.
Both that Talabani has his own "national security advisor", in a system that I had previously understood to be one in which the responsible-to-parliament PM would exercize executive power and the President would perform Queen Elizabeth 2-like ceremonial tasks.
I guess I got that wrong, huh? (But actually, did I?)
If Talabani is really building his own entire parallel ruling apparatus I think the word for that is "divide and rule"?
Also interesting, that Talabani would pick this Samarai person. Can Badr or anyone else give more details to reveal the distance Samarai might actually have traveled from his high-level Baathist past? Also, knowing something about his commitment to democratic principles and the rule of law would, I think, be very informative...
In a related vein, Juan Cole writes today that:
Talabani also warned that for foreign troops to be withdrawn at this point risked provoking civil war. He insisted that Iraq is not occupied[!!!]
Yesterday, the Institute for War and Peace Reporting put out the first edition of its once-daily 'Iraqi Press Monitor' since February 2nd.
I'm glad they've cranked it up again. It's not perfect but it does provide some interesting tidbits. Like one in yesterday's edition, from the Chalabist Al-Mutamar newspaper that referred to someone called "Wafiq al-Samarai, security counsellor to the Iraqi president." Samarai had reportedly issued his "first press release", in which he
I thought the system of government was supposed to be one in the which the Prime Minister headed the executive power?
In today's edition of IPM, they had this report from the SCIRI daily, Al-Adalah:
And now, who can tell us more of the story on what's been happening at IWPR?
Last week, commenter Windinthewhistle commented on this JWN post that:
In 2004, IWPR's management decided that they deserved a swank new office building in London's overheated real-estate market, and bought one. Where the money was supposed to come from for this is anyone's guess, but they probably thought they would skim enough out of their big new Iraq and Afghanistan contracts to pay for it.
Subsequently, IWPR was fired by their prime contractor in Iraq, and tried to salvage their new lifestyle by squeezing their Afghanistan program to death. What they couldn't squeeze, they stole outright, submitting false invoices to the donor and fabricating hundreds of thousands of USD worth of expenses. Once the Afghans understood what was going on, they also fired IWPR, with the blessing of their donors who had caught on. A messy divorce ensued, in which IWPR stole every piece of equipment they could on their way out the door.
Sadly, this is a part of the NGO world seldom reported on --- despite being well known among foreign correspondents in Kabul and Bahgdad. The commitment and hard work of participants in the field, especially those who are supposed to benefit from programs like IWPR, are often subverted not so much by the manipulative designs of donors as by the corruption and incompetence of management sitting in comfort at HQ.
Can someone tell me why 20,000 whitefolks-- most of them reportedly Ozzies or New Zealanders, and many of them young-- would flock to a chilly shore in Turkey early today to commemorate an extremely ill-conceived, British-led assault on the shore of a distant Muslim country that ended up being a complete military fiasco?
It was a big event. Both the Australian and New Zealand Prime Ministers were there. Britain sent Prince Charles. (I guess Tony was too busy running in his current election campaign and trying to dodge questions about a more recent british assault on a Muslim land.)
On so many different scores, the UK-France-Anzac assault on Gallipoli in 1915 was a deep, deep embarrassment. Why on earth would people from the invading countries even want to remember it (except it as a terrible object lesson in what not to do?) And why would so many of them have flocked to Gallipoli today to "commemorate" the 90th anniversary of one of the campaign's key battles?
I do recall, growing up in Middle England in the 1950s, that in the semi-public park opposite my home there was a broad plinth built-- apparently for some further memorial that never in the end materialized atop it-- and it was mysteriously engraved "Gallipoli 1915".
Maybe better that the memorial there never did get finished?
Here's the summary of the Gallipoli campaign, culled from that great "First World War. com" website linked to above:
-- A young (and rash) Winston Churchill was the Secretary of the Navy. He insisted on launching the operation against the advice of most of the professional military and naval thinkers. (H'mmm.)
-- The first attempt to land British and allied forces on Turkish soil at Gallipoli was made in mid-February 1915. It failed. The first successful landings weren't made till April 25. Three subsequent attempts to enlarge those beachheads were repulsed by the Turks.
-- By August or so, the British forces, commanded by Ian Hamilton, had a total of three beachheads. Each was, unfortunately, still overlooked by Turkish positions. "Confidence in the operation in London and Paris was dwindling. Nevertheless Churchill pressed both governments to provide continued support."
-- In October, Hamilton received news that he would soon be ordered to evacuate the peninsula. He protested, and was replaced. London didn't get its act together to actually order the evacuation till December, by which time the evacuation was extremely hazardous.
-- Campaign Summary:
But my question remains: why on earth would those young Ozzies and Kiwis be so eager to travel to Gallipoli and memorialize what happened there?
The militaristic Ozzie PM, John Howard, blustered on to the effect that,
"The original Anzacs [members of the Australia-NZ corps] could not have known at the time that their service would leave all Australians with another enduring legacy - our sense of self," Mr Howard said in an official pre-dawn address at Anzac Cove.
"They bequeathed Australia a lasting sense of national identity, they sharpened our democratic temperament and our questioning eye towards authority...."
22-year-old Australian Ben Hutchinson said, "I had to make a pilgrimage here... [Gallipoli was] the first real bonding of Australia as a country. It's something that formed our identity".
My lord! A nation made out of ex-convicts who became the violent colonizers and expropriators of other peoples' lands... And then they had to travel most of the way back around the world again to invade another people's country in order to "form their own identity"???
Is there something going on here that I just don't understand?
27-year-old New Zealander Angela Taylor was quoted here as saying of the Gallipoli battlefields that, " "They are the one historical place New Zealand has."
??
At least her Prime Minister, Helen Clark, was gracious enough to (unlike John Howard) pay some tribute to the peninsula's fallen Turkish defenders, as well.
I forgot to mention that Turkey's PM, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was also there.
Clark noted-- in what seemed to me to be an appropriately thoughtful vein-- that,
Miss Clark said Gallipoli "scarred our hearts". "To walk on the battlefields of Gallipoli is to walk on ground where so much blood was shed that it has become sacred soil."
But this commemorating-Gallipoli thing-- can anyone out there explain it to me?
One notable thing about the whole campaign, though. It did, then and for quite some time thereafter, wreck the careers of Churchill and his First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir John Fisher. Churchill-- the suit-- was the only one who made a comeback. Fisher, the "brass", died I think still in quite a degree of infamy over the whole event.
My recent long article on Hizbullah has continued to evoke a broad-- and fairly predictable-- range of reactions in various places. I'll be giving a public presentation on the subject in DC on June 1, in case any of you is able to get there. (More details later.) The date is a little delayed, I know. But I really do need to focus on finishing my violence-in-Africa book. Then in late May, I'll be teaching a summer course over at Eastern Mennonite University....
Anyway. Bottom line here. I'm a member of an on-line discussion group on (mainly) Gulf affairs, and recently started reading some postings there on the topic of Bush and Hizbullah. So yesterday I dashed off the following comment:
In Lebanon, the state, being itself weak, has until recently in essence subcontracted many of the security reponsibilities in South Lebanon to Hizbullah, which had "won" that right by being the force that liberated the area from foreign military occupation. (How many other people remember the Israeli-forced "high noon at Kawkaba" back in March 1978?) Hizbullah's command of this private militia is certainly not a desirable situation over the long or even shorter term. But it is overwhelmingly the business of the Lebanese themselves to deal with it. It was interesting to see the very low degree of support the recent Zogby poll found, in many segments of Lebanese society including Maronites, for the idea of a forced disarming of Hizbullah. The Lebanese seem clearly to prefer negotiations to regularize the situation of the people who currently staff the Hizbullah-affiliated territorial defense and deterring-Israel formations in the South. Perhaps this could be done along the lines recently suggested by Sheikh Naim Qasem. This would broadly parallel the efforts Abu Mazen has been pursuing to fold the combatants from Hamas and other militant groups into the centralized PA security structure.
Let's all continue hoping and working for a comprehensive peace in the area-- Israel-Syria, Israel-Lebanon, intra-Lebanese, Israeli-Palestinian, etc. In that context, the amounts of national revenue that all these parties keep tied up until now in military preparedness could be radically reduced. Until then, some form of citizen-based, territorially organized defense probably makes a lot of sense for the people of south Lebanon.
I'd like to be able to argue that a completely nonviolent civilian mass movement might "hold off" the Israelis better than such a force. But the comparative records of the Palestinians' (largely nonviolent) first intifada, which won them nothing lasting from Israel, and Hizbullah's exactly contemporaneous pursuit of armed struggle, which in combination with expert civilian organization did succeed in liberating national territory, would make that argument a very hard sell indeed...
Helena Cobban
So I'll make it:
Go for it!
Using these means successfully requires a strategic and very deeply philosophical commitment to the principles of nonviolence. But since Hizbullah has already shown its high level of experience and expertise in civilian mass organizing it already has much of the groundwork in place for such a campaign.
And no: nonviolence is by no means anathema to Muslim teachings. One of Gandhi's key lieutenants in his principled and successful movement against British occupation was the Pathan leader Badshah Khan, the "Gandhi of the Northwest frontier."
But for now, I just want to add into this post some points that were made in that same on-line discussion forum by the Beirut-based writer Nicholas Blanford, who gave me permission to reproduce them here.
Nick, who's been following Hizbullah a lot more closely than I have and has done so for a number of years, wrote the following:
1. The debate has yet to begin in earnest on the future status of Hizbullah's military wing, the Islamic Resistance, and it probably won't begin until at least after the parliamentary elections scheduled to be held at the end of May. What Hizbullah has been doing through its various declarations is staking out its initial bargaining position. Essentially, their position is as follows: They want the Islamic Resistance to remain intact and under Hizbullah's chain of command while accepting increased coordination with the Lebanese Army (i.e., the government). They will not initiate military confrontations with the Israelis along the Blue Line (the UN name for Lebanon's southern border with Israel and the Golan Heights/Shebaa Farms) with the exception of the Shebaa Farms theater in the south east corner. They will, however, reserve the right to respond to Israeli acts of aggression (overflights, ground breaches of the Blue Line etc). Since 2000, Hizbullah has cultivated a public image of defender of Lebanese sovereignty from Israeli aggression, and its initial bargaining position deviates little from its current modus operandi along the Blue Line.
2. The Islamic Resistance is the beating heart of Hizbullah and the party will do what it can to retain it. They will play for time in the hope that domestic and/or regional developments will intervene to rescue them. In the meantime, the party is even willing to subordinate potential political gains for the sake of the Resistance. That means co-opting and appeasing other Shiite/Sunni political groups to retain them as allies and defenders of the Resistance, rather than alienate them by competing aginst them politically and turning them into opponents.
3. The big question is how far Hizbullah will go to keep the Resistance intact. Will they risk destabilizing Lebanon for the sake of the Resistance or will they yield if the majority of Lebanese clearly support disarmament?
I suspect that they could attempt to trigger an upsurge of violence along the Blue Line which they can blame on Israel and thus justify a continuation of the Resistance. Hizbullah is engaged in a finely calibrated war of nerves with the Israelis along the Blue Line which has its own tacit set of rules recognised and observed by both sides and rarely noticed, appreciated or understood by the general public on either side of the border. I wrote a detailed piece on this in the March edition of Jane's Intelligence Review [snip]. Although Hizbullah will probably push it to the limit to save the Resistance, I don't think it will go so far that it seriously jeopardizes its standing in Lebanon. There is an earnest debate within the party about where to go from here, a repeat of the intense debate in autumn 1999 when a looming resumption of Israeli-Syrian peace talks and the possibility of a peace deal threatened the future of the Resistance.
4. Hizbullah's initial negotiating stance notwithstanding, there is [ample] scope for compromise, acknowledged by some Hizbullah officials in private. One possible option is to fold the Islamic Resistance into the Lebanese Army, possibly as a separate southern border protection force. By no means easy and at the moment opposed by Hizbullah on the somewhat disengenuous grounds that the Lebanese army would be subject to direct retaliation by the Israelis for Islamic Resistance ops in the Shebaa Farms and that the Resistance' guerrilla nature and Islamic ideology do not sit comfortably within the framework of a conventional army. One Hizbullah official told me the other day that valued as the Resistance is, there are non-violent means of resisting Israel and the military wing is not the be all and end all of Hizbullah. [Emphasis by HC there.] Another official told me that if non-Shiite Lebanese are concerned about the notion of an autonomous Shiite military force operating in Lebanon, then the Resistance could be opened up to all Lebanese confessions, apparently similar to the multi-faith Lebanese Resistance Brigades which Hizbullah set up in the late 1990s. Clearly, that will not appease Hizbullah's critics in Lebanon, but it does show that the party is thinking laterally. Hizbullah is deeply suspicious about the Lebanese trait of looking for outside assistance. They regard Resolution 1559 as a US-Israeli plot to defang Israel's most resolute opponent and in that context see no reason why they should comply. The Lebanese opposition for the most part appears willing to strike a deal with Hizbullah rather than confront the party over the Resistance. For the sake of Lebanon, which is passing through a sensitive period, the issue has to be handled with nuance, tact and compromise, regardless of what one thinks of Hizbullah and the Islamic Resistance. One would hope that the Bush administration will cease making pronouncements about Hizbullah - favourable or otherwise - and let the Lebanese resolve this issue.
A few extra points...
One element that is overlooked in the debate, particularly among Lebanese not from the south, is the fears of southern Shiites about future Israeli aggressions. The southerners have lived with violence for almost 40 years and many see the Islamic Resistance, rightly or wrongly, as their only guarantee of protection.
Linked to the above, Hizbullah fears that dismantling the Islamic Resistance will leave the leadership and its cadres vulnerable to Israeli assassination attempts or possible extradition demands by the US. What guarantees, they ask, can a future Lebanese government offer for their safety if it no longer possesses the Islamic Resistance as a deterrent?
Nasrallah lost some brownie points with many Lebanese for his defiantly public show of support for Syria at the Riad al-Solh rally on March 8. One should bear in mind, however, that Hizbullah kept a very low non-committal profile for the first 2-3 weeks after Rafik Hariri's assassination. The Riad al-Solh rally came after the Syrians placed a great deal of pressure on Nasrallah to start demonstrating some loyalty to Damascus. My understanding is that Nasrallah was deeply embarrassed by the rally. He is no fool and understood the consequences of what he was doing. But at the time, when the fate of Syrian hegemony over Lebanon could have swung either way, he felt he had no choice but to comply.
On [the] point [raised by someone else] about the inadvisability of dismissing militiamen from their jobs, one should bear in mind that we are not talking about a vast number of people. There have been several reports cropping up in the international media recently citing the Islamic Resistance' strength at between 20,000-25,000. Where that figure came from I don't know, but the actual number is in the hundreds. These are well-trained veteran fighters who patrol stretches of the border, man observation posts and stake out the Shebaa Farms area. Hizbullah is not concerned about keeping the Resistance intact for the sake of employing their guys. They admit that if the Resistance was to disband (and not be wrapped into the Lebanese Army), the fighters would find alternative employment within the party framework.
Re. the 1989 Taif Accord's clause on dismantling militias. Hizbullah originally opposed Taif for that very reason. But a Syrian-Iranian deal allowed the "national resistance" (ie Hizbullah) to retain its weapons to battle the Israeli occupation in the south. Hizbullah says today that it is a "resistance" force, not a "militia" as referred to by Taif, thus is exempt from Taif's provisions.
Nicholas Blanford
Beirut
In the end, as in any case where the evidence seems contradictory, it seems to me that the best thing to do is for outsiders concerned about the situation but also concerned about the wellbeing of all the people of south Lebanon, as well as all their neighbors to probe the thinking of the party leadership even more. Through engagement in a friendly and open-ended dialogue.
Which is what I was urging at the end of my Boston Review piece. Let's just hope that this happens-- and sooner, rather than later.
It's twelve weeks today since January's significant (if certainly not perfect) multi-party election in Iraq. And still, the party list that won the majority of seats has been prevented-- both by the strictures of the US-dictated Transitional Administrative Law and by the manueverings of key US allies in the country-- from being able to form a government accountable to the elected National Assembly.
The Bush administration, it seems to me, has just about completely "blown" the extremely valuable second chance it was handed, virtually on a plate, by the Iraqi voters back on January 30th.
The "first chance" Washington had to effect constructive social and political reform in Iraq was right after the US military victory back in April 2003. As longtime JWN readers will recall, I always opposed the decision to go to war. But once it had been fought, and apparently militarily "won", I did not pursue a vengeful attitude toward its authors but instead advocated strongly for a reconciliatory and rehabilitative approach.
They didn't take my advice. (Nothing new there, but I persist in giving it.) Instead, they pursued many of the most anti-humanitarian tactics of classic colonialist "pacifications", particularly through their mass-detentions policy and their launching of extremely nasty "punitive expeditions" in Najaf, Fallujah, and elsewhere. All of which expeditions were chosen in preference to the option of negotiations that was very present in all or nearly all of those situations.
At least, though, the Bushies showed some commitment to the goal of democratic elections. On this blog and elsewhere, I spoke out and lauded that goal, despite the many evident shortcomings with the idea of trying to hold decent elections in a situation of continued military occupation and rampant public insecurity.
The majority of the Iraqi people showed great courage, and turned out to vote. And miraculously, through that act they offered the US occupation authorities in Iraq an extremely valuable "second chance". Indeed, this second chance had even more legitimacy than the first one, since it was won through the US forces' support for a fairly genuine exercise in Iraqi popular consultation.
Moreover, unlike the Bushies' "first chance" back in April 2003, the second chance was something that democrats and reformers throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds could empathize with, and openly hope to emulate. It therefore had an extremely broad "resonance effect" throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds. (A failure of the 'democratic experiment' in Iraq will, as a result, have a much broader domino effect than anything the US suffered as a result of the failure in Vietnam... )
Much-needed political and social reform could, it was hoped, come through the act of voting! How much more palatable is that as an strategy, for everyone, than the idea of reform coming through military aggression?
But the Bushies are, I think, very close indeed to having blown this second chance...
Is it too early to make a definitive judgment on this? (I have been keeping the "Democracy denied in Iraq" counter up on the sidebar here for more than seven weeks now, and have always hoping to be able to take it down "soon"....)
The latest word on the AP wire tonight is that,
... Al-Jaafari's list could be put to parliament as early as Monday, some of his bloc said. Others indicated the Cabinet announcement would be made Tuesday.
But even if Jaafari is able to win parliamentary support for his list on Monday or Tuesday, how much real ability will his government have to govern?
This is an extremely serious issue. And much of the answer lies in the hands of the country's US occupation administration. (I hope JWN readers haven't for a moment been taken in by the Bushites' protestations that they are "not an occupation force" in Iraq any more. Of course they are-- both in fact, and under international law.)
An empowered, elected Iraqi government would chart its own course in pursuing questions of internal politics. Certainly, it would not have to listen to fatwas such as that issued by Donald Rumsfeld when, during his recent visit, he explicitly "told" the Iraqis what they could and couldn't do with regard to former Baathists.
An empowered, elected Iraqi government would have full control over national resources and national revenues.
An empowered, elected Iraqi government would chart its own course with regard to national security. That course would most likely involve reaching agreements with the country's neighbors, as well as with those portions of the occupying forces still remaining (or not) inside the country.
An empowered, elected Iraqi government could make its own appeals to whatever portions of the international community it should choose to, for help in attaining any of its national tasks. It would certainly not feel beholden to any diktats coming out of Washington.
... Meanwhile, we should note that much of the "story" that has been told by the mainstream US media about recent events in Iraq has claimed that the situation in the country got notably better for a whole period after the elections, and is only now threatening to get worse.
But that is actually a completely wrong view to present...
In fact, as I noted in this mid-March JWN post, the weeks immediately after the election saw a continuation or even escalation of terrible acts of mass terror aimed mainly at Shiite civilian gatherings.
What had gone down a little bit in those weeks was the presence of US reports on the scene capable of writing about that, and also perhaps, a little, acts that targeted US forces.
Juan Cole tried to argue yesterday that, "there is no particular connection between the guerrilla war and the political process. No one is blowing up a Shiite mosque because Ibrahim Jaafari hasn't appointed a minister of public works yet."
I think that view is seriously misguided. Perhaps it's true that it is not the specific lack of a minister of public works that has contributed to the violence. (Although the existence of an effective and in-command ministry could certainly help both to offer jobs to people who sorely need them, and to provide sorely, sorely needed public services to people in beleaguered communities...)
But at a broader level, an empowered Jaafari government would also be in a position to use all the levers of national power to lead a serious national dialogue/reconciliation effort with all authentically Iraqi factions, and thus to leave the foreign jihadis almost completely without a viable local political base.
But there is so much, completely cockeyed (and highly ideological) political "spin" being put out about such issues by various suspect US sources... Like those who say, fatalistically, that "guerrilla insurgencies like this one have a 'natural' life-cycle of some 8-10 years, so we can't expect to beat this one any sooner than that... "
What kind of mechanistic baloney is that?
No-one has yet even tried a serious policy of proactively reaching out to engage a broad swathe of the Iraqi Sunnis in dialogue with the hope of cutting off the support of the foreign jihadis. Certainly not Allawi! He had (I think) clear choices to make regarding how to handle the insurgencies in Fallujah, Ramadi, Mosul, and elsewhere over recent months... And in every single one of those cases he chose escalation and violence over the option of peace.
It strikes me as quite possible, indeed, that Rumsfeld's protestations that they "don't have" an exit strategy from Iraq might well be untruthful. I think I'm seeing a US "exit strategy" being prepared right now. It basically aims at leaving the country without any effective government, then turning round to the US public and the world and saying, "Look, you see how ungrateful and basically 'primitive' the Iraqis are? We gave them every chance, and they blew it. It is just the re-emergence of 'ancient tribal hatreds' there in Iraq, and there's nothing we can do except keep a few forward bases of US strike forces there in that lawless country, just as we're doing in Afghanistan... "
How else can you explain the notable passivity of the Bush administration with regard to the political challenges Iraq has faced ever since the January 30 election? The Bushites protest, on camera, that "Oh, we do not want to be intervening in internal Iraqi affairs..."
Baloney! They intervene all the time. Every day, and in every way... Except in the one helpful way in which it might make a real difference. Namely, by telling their cat's-paw Allawi and their allies the Kurds that the establishment of an empowered and democratically accountable Iraqi government is a high priotity for the Bush administration and the world.
Have we heard them say that? Have we heard them say anything helpful at all about Iraq's government-formation challenge?
Is there even anyone at all in Washington who has been placed in charge of the Iraqi empowerment file?
No, no, and no.
This passivity toward government formation in Iraq cannot be an oversight. It has to be wilfull. To what end, then? Does anyone out there have an explanation that makes any more sense than mine?
And how, more to the point, can the Iraqi people formulate a policy that will save their country from the ruin and fitna that currently face it?
WaPo article by Josh White today:
White's piece notes that Brig. Gen Janis Karpinski is the only flag officer so far to have been recommended for punishment.
The article also provides a brief and generally clear summary of all the many previous (and deeply overlapping) " investigations" the military has carried out over the past year into the abuse/torture of detainees.
Clausewitz, of course, was the person who famously coined the phrase "fog of war". I sometimes think that what the Penatgon's high-ups have achieved by organizing these numerous overlapping investigations has been to create "the fog of investigation".
But maybe I'm too cynical.
What I do know is that there has been nothing like the clear, unequivocal leadership that has been needed from every civilian and military portion of the US national command structure that states flat-out that no act of torture or abuse will be tolerated!; that any suspected instances of abuse or torture will be investigated immediately, and any guilty party punished!; and that the Geneva Conventions and other essential humanitarian-law protections for detainees remain our sole standard!
Those kinds of clear leadership actions are what I was calling for in May and June of last year when I was writing a lot about the need for a clear posture of zero tolerance for torture. Here, or here, or here.
The Bushies, though, chose not go that route. Now, I know full well that as I write this, US government employees and contractors somewhere around the world are abusing and torturing detainees-- on my tax dollar. It makes me sick to my stomach. It also makes me think more seriously than before about trying to become a war tax resister.
A really great article by Nora Bustany in the April 22 WaPo about a group of Lebanese former fighters working together to promote reconciliation.
They were brought together by Initiatives of Change, a non-governmental organization formerly known as the Moral Rearmament Association.
I know that the MRA played an important role in facilitating quiet, behind-the-scenes contacts between French and German opinion leaders after WW2. I hadn't caught up with their recent work. It looks really interesting.
I can't write more now (rushing for plane to Philadelphia) but I just note that I've been writing quite a bit about a similar initiative-- that has gotten former foes to work together doing joint peace-promotion efforts in a Mozambican context-- here, here, and in my continuing book-writing project.
I'm in a real rush today. There was an interesting article in toway's WaPo by Ann Scott Tyson (embedded). It gave a clear picture of how the US forces have almost zero control of the terrain, just 25 miles out of downotwn Baghdad. (Okay, so there are huge areas of Baghdad itself where they have no control, either.)
I found this portion, where a US Army captain commanding a small position at the south of the "Triangle of Death" is describing his situation to a visiting colonel, particularly interesting:
When the British Army suffered terrible losses and strategic setbacks in Iraq back in 1916-17, it was precisely because of completely insufficient logistic support for their forward positions. And yet, in 2003, Donald Rumsfeld blithely thought he could ignore the lessons of history (and all the good advice the uniformed military had tried to give him), and decided to go ahead and conquer Iraq with an ultra-"lean" attacking force, anyway.
The US forces-- but also, to a much greater extent, the Iraqi people-- have been suffering the chaotic, disastrous consequences of that decision ever since.
I've been thinking of trying to write a broad strategic survey of what's been happening with the war, but I absolutely need to continue concentrating on my Africa book.
So while I do that, I'll leave the comments thread here for y'all to put in additional news about Iraq.
This, from AP's Thomas Wagner a couple of hourse ago:
"What happened to me represents an insult to the whole National Assembly that was elected by the Iraqi people. This shows that the democracy we are enjoying is fake," al-Sheik said. "Through such incidents, the U.S. Army tries to show that it is the real controlling power in the country, not the new Iraqi government."
Al-Sheik's small party has been linked to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who led uprisings against the U.S.-led coalition in 2004...
The U.S. military said its initial investigation indicated that in the morning, al-Sheik got into an altercation with a coalition translator at the checkpoint. U.S. soldiers tried to separate them and "briefly held on to the legislator," while preventing another member of al-Sheik's party from getting out of his vehicle, a military statement said.
"We have the highest respect for all members of the Transitional National Assembly. Their safety and security is critically important," U.S. Brig. Gen. Karl R. Horst said in the statement. "We regret this incident occurred and are conducting a thorough investigation."
[Right. And we'll hear the results of this "investigation" when? Actually, most of the basic facts about what happened could be "discovered" and reported on publicly just about immediately... Like, were handcuffs in fact used? Was the legislature in fact mocked? Let the US military get the whole truth out, right away. There is no need for any kind of a lengthy, time-wasting "investigation" on this: just the truth, and with due speed.]
During a one-hour adjournment to protest al-Sheik's treatment, lawmaker Salam al-Maliki read an assembly statement demanding an apology from the U.S. Embassy and the prosecution of the soldier who allegedly mistreated the legislator.
Hajim al-Hassani, the parliament speaker, said: "We reject any sign of disrespect directed at lawmakers."
So today, the western media have breathlessly broken into all their news bulletins to say that the cry of "habemus papum" (We have a pope) has gone up from the Vatican.
Like that's news? Like, the 120 or however many aging male cardinals were going to sit around forever and not come to agreement on which of their number would become pope?
But when, I wonder will we hear the joyous cry from Baghdad that "We have a democratically accountable government"?? (Do you think it would sound better in Latin? My dear late father, a Latin-and-Greek teacher, would be ashamed of how unable I feel right now, several languages later, to compose this simple phrase in Latin...)
This new Pope sounds incredibly Dick Cheney-ish, don't you think? The guy was put in charge of a high-level political "search" process that ended up discovering that the best candidate for the job in question was indeed.... himself???
Just thinking about this whole process makes me unbelievably glad I'm a member of a faith community (the Quakers) that doesn't believe in the "anointing" of some people to be spiritual "leaders" while others-- including, in the case of the Catholics, all the females on God's earth-- get stuck in the role of merely doing what they're told.
I've been wondering, too, if the cardinals who think that they might, just might, get appointed pope at the next "conclave" spend much time along the way picking out their future papal "names"... How long do you think this Cardinal Ratzinger has been practicing signing his name "Benedict"??
But back to my main point. Ratzinger/"Benedict" was "elected" today, and will be installed as Pope on Sunday. Five days. In Iraq, the UIA list was elected to head the National Assembly back on January 30th, and huge numbers of factors have since intervened-- including, most recently, the desperately obstructive maneuverings of long-time CIA cat's-paw Iyad Allawi; not to mention Don Rumsfeld-- to prevent that list from even forming its government, let alone taking over any of the reins of real power in Iraq.
79 days, and still counting. It makes even the Vatican look like a model of efficiency.
Lebanon's latest PM-designate Najib Miqati has now named his government. The new government's main role will be to steer the country through its much-needed parliamentary elections, which should take place before the term of the current parliament ends May 31.
Miqati, who is apparently a mild-mannered guy with links to most parts of Lebanon's political spectrum, has named a much smaller government than usual-- only 14 members instead of the usual 30 or so. (The 30 figure had become traditional as a way of getting all the extremely intricate balancing of this tiny Armenian church sect versus that Greek Orthodox church sect versus that Druze sect, etc, etc, exactly "right"... It had nothing at all to do with actually delivering a decent level of government service to citizens on an accountable basis-- much more to do with divvying up the national patronage cake among its greedy claimants.)
Organizing the elections--which still also requires passage by the existing parliament of a new election law, which has to happen each time in Lebanon!-- will be in the hands of new Interior Minister Hassan Sabei, a retired General Security officer who's considered close to the Hariri family.
My dear old friend Ghassan Salameh, who had previously served in a Hariri-led government as Culture Minister, comes back as Minister for Higher Education and Culture, both.
Ghassan served as political advisor to Lakhdar Ibrahimi when Lakhdar was the UN's representative in Iraq in mid and late 2003. In November 2003, Ghassan delivered this interesting presentation on the Iraq situation to a gathering in London. In it, he urged the international community to transform the US military presence in Iraq into a truly multinational force operating under a UN mandate. He urged the occupying power to go slow on privatization of the Iraqi economy, and to work hard on trying to engage all of Iraq's neighbors cooperatively in the project of reconstruction...
But I guess for the next few weeks, at least, Ghassan will be busy primarily on Lebanese political issues.
I strongly hope that Miqati and his team, and the whole of the present Lebanese parliament can succeed in having an election that is free and fair, and effectively insulated from all outside influence; that its results are accepted as legitimate by the vast majority of Lebanese; and that it generates a parliament and a new government who see their first duty as being to serve Lebanon's citizenry rather than line their own (or anyone else's) pockets.
If this latter outcome is won, that would truly be a first for Lebanon.
(If you haven't yet seen my big Boston Review article on Hizbullah and Lebanon, you can find some good background material there on the role Hizbullah has played in Lebanese electoral politics over the past 13 years.)
This is an extremely informative and inspiring article in today's NYT about the use of traditional healing ceremonies to reconcile conflict-torn communities in northern Uganda.
Reporter Marc Lacey reports from Gulu, in northern Uganda, that,
The fighting features rebels who call themselves the Lord's Resistance Army and who speak earnestly of the import of the Ten Commandments, but who routinely hack up civilians who get in their way. To add to their numbers, the rebels abduct children in the night, brainwash them in the bush, indoctrinate them by forcing them to kill, and then turn them - 20,000 over the last two decades - into the next wave of ferocious fighters seeking to topple the government. Girls as young as 12 are assigned as rebel commanders' wives. Anyone who does not toe the line is brutally killed.
The international court [that is, the Hague-based ICC], invited to investigate the war by President Yoweri Museveni, has announced it is close to issuing arrest warrants for rebel leaders including, no doubt, Joseph Kony, the self-styled spiritualist calling the shots. But some war victims are urging the international court to back off. They say the local people will suffer if the rebel command feels cornered. They recommend giving forgiveness more of a chance, using an age-old ceremony involving raw eggs.
"When we talk of arrest warrants it sounds so simple," said David Onen Acana II, the chief of the Acholi, the dominant tribe in the war-riven north, who traveled to The Hague recently to make his objections known. "But an arrest warrant doesn't mean the war will end."
Uganda is not, alas, one of the countries I'm writing about in my current book project, which deals precisely with this issue of the relationship between "judging/prosecutorial" approaches to dealing with the legacies of atrocious conflict and alternative, amnesty-based and more "healing"-oriented approaches.
One of my key "cases" is that of Mozambique, where the local people used a very similar, healing-based approach drawing on many indigenous (that is, pre-colonial) healing traditions to deal with the legacies of the equally ghastly violence that occurred during the 1977-92 civil war there.
The Mozambicans concluded their peace agreement, with Italian and UN backing, in October 1992. That was just before the UN created the first of the ad-hoc war-crimes courts of the modern age-- the one for former Yugoslavia, called ICTY.
After the creation of ICTY, and the parallel ad-hoc tribunal for Rwanda-- ICTR-- activists in the western-based human rights movement got the idea that creating war-crimes courts to deal with the legacies of atrocious violence was definitely the best thing to do... In 1998 they secured the passage of the "Rome Treaty", which established a permanent International Criminal Court, ICC, which came into effect in 2002.
Since then it has been much harder for people seeking a negotiated end to atrocity-laden conflicts to succeed, because one of the key "incentives" peace-seekers had in pre-ICC situations-- that of offering amnesty to former wrongdoers-- had been almost completely taken away from them by the creation of the ICC.
Luckily, though, last week a delegation of 24 Ugandan men and women representing four different social groupings in northern Uganda visited ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo to discuss the situation there and their concerns about the effects of a reckless issuing of indictments.
Back in July last year, Moreno-Ocampo had announced that he had formally "found" that there was sufficient evidence of atrocities in northern Uganda that he had decided to open a formal judicial investigation into the situation. This kind of "investigation" could normally be expected to lead to the issuing of indictments, though none has been issued-- for Uganda or anywhere else-- by Moreno-Ocampo yet.
The joint statement issued at the end of last week's meeting between the delegates from northern Uganda and Moreno-Ocampo made the following points:
The Lango; Acholi; Iteso and Madi community leaders and the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court have agreed to work together as part of a common effort to achieve justice and reconciliation, the rebuilding of communities and an end to violence in Northern Uganda.
The community leaders reach out to local communities, the Government of Uganda, national and international actors to join this common effort.
We urge the Lord’s Resistance Army members to respond positively to the appeal to end violence.
We appeal to the Government of The Sudan to continue cooperating with the Government of Uganda, the ICC, international actors and all stakeholders in an effort to bring peace to Uganda.
In working towards an end to violence, all parties agreed to continue to integrate the dialogue for peace, the ICC and traditional justice and reconciliation processes.
We call upon national and international actors to enhance interventions to alleviate the grave humanitarian situation in the region.
I note that the delegation included the Paramount Chief of the Acholi people, the Traditional Chief of the Iteso (Emorimor) people, and the Bishop of Northern Uganda (presumably, Anglican?) It also included a number of substantial-looking women leaders.
I say "Yes!" to supporting traditional healing and justice mechanisms, which usually have so much more to offer society than the inherently divisive and always expensive prosecutorial approach so strongly favored these days by western "rights" activists. My hope with my current project is to get the international community-- including my fellow "rights" activists in the western world -- to recognize that there are usually far better ways than prosecutorialism to deal with the legacies of atrocious conflict...
I also hope to support whatever efforts I can that aim to identify and support indigenous rstorative-justice mechanisms before they all become swamped by a tsunami of "modernization" marked by western-style prosecutorialism.
Here in the US, we have two million people in jail and a further one-million-plus to guard them. Can you imagine how stupid this is as a way to deal with the effects of violence in society? What other society on earth could afford this degree of prosecutorialism? Let's hope we can support and hang onto Uganda's traditional justice mechanisms, and all the others that "indigenous" people around the world have developed and sustained throughout the generations, as strongly and for as long as we can.
There have recently been a bunch of news reports about alleged Sunni extremists in Iraq having taken hostage "up to 100" (though no-one really seems to know the real number) Shiite Muslim residents of the town of Madain, south of Baghdad.
This hostage-taking is really a scary, scary phenomenon.
I remember how similar cross-sectarian hostage-taking was a big feature of the early years of the civil war in Lebanon. The agony both of those who are taken hostage and of family members left behind, who have no idea at all about the whereabouts, life/death status, or health situation of their loved ones (and always tend to fear the worst), is hard to convey to people who have never encountered such a happening.
Such actions should all be ended! Immediately!!
But what, at the end of the day, is the moral difference between such hostage-taking and the practice of the US and Allawist forces up to now, of taking massive numbers of Iraqi "insurgents" as detainees and holding them-- often in undisclosed locations-- for weeks and months without trial?
As I noted in this JWN post April 11, as of then some 14,400 Iraqis were being held without trial, by the US forces or the Allawist-Iraqi forces. Of those, roughly 6,500 were being held by the "Iraqi" forces, just a handful by the Brits, and nearly 8,000 by the US forces.
Shame!
Imagine the anguish of an Iraqi mother whose son or spouse has been picked up in such a raid and taken away-- with no real thought of a trial in mind for him-- to some distant US-run detention center. The location, life/death status, and health situation may well also be kept secret from the detainees' family members for many long weeks or months. And we know that terrible mistreatment goes on in these places of detention and indeed-- in the case of US detention centers-- that non-trivial numbers of inmates have died as a result of their treatment there.
Someone explain to me how this is any different from hostage-taking?
In such situations of mass detentions without trial (Iraq, Palestine, Guantanamo, elsewhere), it is a completely natural demand from members of the targeted community that the people detained without trial should be freed. Simply freed. Unless credible charges of criminal wrongdoing are brought against them, in which case that should happen with due speed, in a duly constituted court of law.
But the powers that hold these "hostage" detainees are often, actually, seeking to use them as a bargaining chip, and to "win" something politically for their release. Or, they are seeking to use them to try to brainwash them, with the hope that by breaking the will of these numerous individuals they can break the will of the opposition movement with which they are assumed to be aligned.
Both such uses of hostages-- indeed, the very act of hostage-taking itself-- are quite forbidden under international law.
Does this prevent the US and Israel from continuing the practice? No, it does not.
The demand voiced by various opposition forces in Iraq for the release of all those detainnes against whom credible criminal charges cannot be brought is a basic one. New Iraqi President Jalal Talabani has said he's interested in providing an amnesty for all insurgents who don't have the blood of Iraq civilians (or, perhaps, Iraqi security forces) on their hands.
What's to stop him just following through, immediately, on that offer? I think that as President he probably has the authority to free all the Iraqis held by his forces who have not been convicted of or charged with any crime. He also, certainly, has the moral authority to demand, flat out, that the "guest forces" now present in his country release all the Iraqi detainees that they're holding as well.
So what about it, Uncle Jalal? What's to stop you doing this? Turn yourself into a truly Iraqi national figure by demanding the freeing of your compatriots from the foreigners' hands.
If at the same time you've been successful in winning the freedom of the hostages from Madain (however many they are), then you would end up with a lot more political legitimacy nationwide than you now have.
And solid democratic principles like "no imprisonment without trial" would meanwhile be strongly reinforced...
Marla Ruzicka was an extremely compassionate and talented person who sought constantly to understand, chart, and publicize the steep human costs of war. Any war. Including in Iraq.
At the end of 2003, working with Raed Jarrar and other Iraqis, she helped produce the first systematic Iraq-wide survey of casualties attrobutable to the war the US launched upon the country in March 2003. The results were published here.
Now Marla herself has joined the casualty list. Raed reports that he has been informed that Marla was killed in a car crash in Baghdad Saturday night.
Raed posts this email he got from Justin Alexander:
Sometime between 3-6pm Baghdad time Marla died in a car crash. My current information is poor, but the accident may have happened on the Baghdad Airport road as she travelled to visit an Iraqi kid injured by a bomb, part of her daily work of identifying and supporting innocent victims of this conflict.
A US military convoy was involved in the event, but it is not clear at this stage in what way precisely.
I have no information on the whereabouts or health of her collegue Faiz who I believe was with her in the car.
I believe it is important that Marla be commemorated and that her work continue. In the short term I hope her friends will be able to identify and help those Iraqis she was in the process of assisting.
[...]
Marla was one innocent victim of conflict among millions, but I believe her work over the last two years has made a unique impact in highlighting and helping these people often forgotten as "collatoral damage".
RIP, Marla Ruzicka. RIP, all the victims of war.
This is a good profile of Marla that ran in the WaPo last August.
This is a letter she wrote to the editor of the NYT just in February.
What can we do to commemorate Marla?
Faiza of "A family in Baghdad" has her most recent post now up on her blog in English. Go read it. It's about her experience at some kind of "democracy in Iraq" conference to which she'd been invited. It was hosted by some US organizations, which she doesn't name but they probably included the US taxpayer-funded "U.S. National Endowment for Democracy" etc etc.
The conference was in Amman. Many women traveled to it from Iraq, though Faiza has been living in Amman for a few weeks now.
She and apparently many of the other Iraqi women at the conference were not happy with the "brain wash" they felt they were being exposed to there. I'd give you excerpts but regret I don't have the time.
The Institute for War & Peace Reporting's Iraq projects have sadly been in real trouble recently. I don't know if all their good participants and trainees got snapped up to work for deep-pocket western media people? If so, that's a real shame, because the project, which produces articles in Arabic and Kurdish editions as well as in English, has always looked poised to make a serious contribution to the development of independent journalism inside Iraq.
However, their projects in the Balkans have been continuing in great shape. I have long been interested in the issue of Kosovo, both in itself and as one of the primary locations for the experiment many western neo-cons and neo-liberals have been undertaking in remaking the world in the way they would like to see it.
Primarily (in Kosovo as in Kurdistan) by nibbling away at the national territory of a nation-state whose leaders they have seriously disagreed with, while making all kinds of promises to the people of the nibbled-away area.
I should recall that unlike many of my friends in the western "human rights" movement I opposed NATO's war for Kosovo in 1999 and have seen no reason at all since then to revisit the judgment I made on that.
In Kosovo in 1999 as in Iraq four years later, in the lead-up to the war there were people from an internationally mandated monitoring organization on the ground inside the territory up to the point of the western powers declaring the war; and that monitoring presence was doing a fairly good (though not perfect) job of preventing/reducing the evil it was supposed to be monitoring. Then, in both cases, Washington decided it wanted to go to war; the moniotoring presence was then rapidly pulled out; and the situation that subsequently unfolded in Kosovo was then the perpetration of precisely those exact great wrongs that NATO had claimed all along it was seeking to prevent! (In Iraq, after the pullout of the UNMOVIC monitors, the proliferation of weapons--though not of WMDs, since there were none-- similarly started precisely after the pull-out of UNMOVIC and the start of the US war.)
Well, all that is now history. What of Kosovo today-- a territory that has received fantastically great gobs of western aid and many western promises that everyone's lives there would be improved by the eviction of the Yugoslav troops and their replacement by NATO?
We could pick up the story, viw IWPR's reporting, back in mid-March of this year, when former Kosovo PM Ramush Haradinaj turned himself in to the International Copurt (ICTY) in The Hague where he faced 37 counts of crimes against humanity and violations of the laws or customs of war:
Prosecutors allege that as one of the most senior commanders of the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, in the late Nineties, he was responsible for brutal tactics intended to drive Serbs from their homes and ensure KLA dominance in Western Kosovo.
He is said by prosecutors to have been present when prisoners were beaten and mutilated, and when orders were given to execute them.
Haradinai's departure threw the ever-fragile Kosovo political system into a state of uncertainty. On March 15, there was a bomb blast apparently targeting President Ibrahim Rugova.
On April 1, Stacy Sullivan was reporting this from Pristina and New:
Despite some signs of progress, underlying political and economic problems facing Kosovo will make it difficult to satisfy the [UN-imposed] requirements, and to move out of the state of limbo the protectorate has been in for the last six years, neither ruled by Serbia nor independent from it.
Economic depression coupled with signs of growing radical nationalism and hostility toward the UN administration mean that the current status quo may not be tenable for much longer - yet the signs of incipient crisis do not seem to be reflected in the sluggish approach taken by the international community...
"It was clear that I made the best offer but it was still not accepted," he recalled.
Hajdini added that the bidding process was accompanied by open threats, delivered over the telephone, attempting to discourage him from making an offer.
"Just imagine what an unhealthy business environment Kosovo presents if you receive threats just for trying to buy [something]," he said.
On April 14, IWPR published a whole clutch of stories about the situation of ethnic minorities in the "New Kosovo".
Like this one, by Dia Krasniqi and Sanela Memet from Pristina:
... Zymberi's house was burned in the March riots [of 2004], the two-day rampage when mobs of ethnic Albanians targeted Serbs and other minorities including the Ashkali, Roma and Egyptians.
Hundreds of homes were burned, leaving up to 4,000 people displaced and 19 people dead.
Out of 69 Ashkali families that were made homeless in Vushtrri during the riots, only 10 have been persuaded to go back to homes that have so far been rebuilt by the Kosovo government.
... Haxhi Zylfi Merxha, leader of United Party of Kosovo Roma, PreBK, and a parliamentary deputy, said certain standards have to be met before asking Roma to return.
“I am not pleased at all with the way the return process is going,” said Merxha. “Kosovo has to secure some basic conditions, to facilitate the return of Roma, such as rebuilding their houses and providing jobs and education.”
According to the 1991 census, there used to be about 150,000 Roma, Ashkali and Egyptians in Kosovo. Merxha said only 50,000 are left today. About 20,000 are believed to be in neighbouring countries like Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia, while the rest have left for Western Europe.
Only some 25,000 Roma remain in Kosovo today, a tiny remnant of a community that was estimated at anywhere between 60,000 and 200,000 people in the past. Those who have stayed in the protectorate find themselves in a precarious position.
The situation in Fabricka Mahala – a quarter in Kosovska Mitrovica that was once home to one of the largest and oldest Roma communities in the region – is a case in point. The area was looted and burned to the ground just a week after the end of the NATO bombing campaign in June 1999, and today most of its former inhabitants remain living outside Kosovo. Others have moved to a refugee camp in Zitkovac, where they inhabit ground poisoned by the remnants of a nearby factory.
The situation is the same all over the region: Kosovo Roma are today the last inhabitants of refugee camps in the former Yugoslavia. Tens of thousands of Roma live in informal settlements, often without access to water, electricity and other basic services, and under permanent threat of eviction. They survive on money scraped together from occasional work, begging, charity donations and selling whatever they can find in rubbish bins.
Okay, JWN readers, I need some help here. I know (roughly) who the Roma are. Who are the "Ashkali" and the "Egyptians"? Are the "Egyptians" actually Egyptians, or are they another branch of the Roma (since Roma people have often been mistaken for "Egyptians" in the past)?
And the Ashkali??
Anyway, beyond that [point of clarification, I do think the broader point about the fissiparous tendencies of territories in which national or ethnic claims are made paramount needs to be constantly borne in mind. That is, the threat posed to members of even smaller minority groups at a time when a lot of stress is put on the claims of members of some larger "minority" groups...
Some extremely disturbing things have been happening along those lines in the NATO protectorate in Kosovo-- and they now look well set to happen with respect to members of non-Kurdish groups within the emerging "Kurdistan".
(One last footnote about Kurdistan. I didn't realize there was any place in the Mashriq-- the Fertile Crescent area-- where people did any female genital modification/mutilation. But here is a recent report by IWPR's Roonak Faraj and Talar Nadir in Sulaimaniyah, describing how prevalent it is even today in many parts of Kurdistan.)
I did a bit more tweaking on the main JWN sidebar this morning. Including, I thought I should put in links to some of the documents I've archived on JWN in the past few months, so there's a whole new sidebar section for that.
Then I decided that in our tour of different world calendars we'd spent long enough reading the dates in Slovak. The next option down was Slovenian, which was very similar. Below that was Spanish, which I thought would be a little bland. Maybe I'll come back to it later?
So now we've arrived at Suomi. Oh my gosh. Happy huhtikuu 16 to all of you.
I think maybe I'd better put something on the sidebar that explains what's going on here?
Every so often, I get an email from someone called "halah@qorvis.com". Since I vaguely remember that these are press releases from the Saudi Embassy in DC, I usually delete them just as fast as I delete all the other junk that comes into my in-box.
Today, I decided to open it. It contained just under 600 words of totally useless, non-newsworthy garbage. Interesting only faintly, in its capacity as providing a teeny window into what it is that someone at Qorvis Communications Inc., the p.r. agency hired by the Saudi Embassy, thinks it is that people might want to be hearing from the Saudis these days.
I reproduce the email in its entirety (and lightly annotated by yours truly) below.
So after opening the email I decided to refresh myself as to what this deal is that the Qorvis Corporation has with the Saudis. There's a lot of interesting information out there on the topic.
Including this, from the WaPo last December, which says:
A part of me feels really sorry for the Saudis. They're shelling out $2.43 million a month to this "Qorvis Communications", and they get rubbish like this in response? (See text of press release, below.)
It reminds me of those extremely unfortunate American Indian tribes, newly very rich with casino profits, who have recently been taken majorly for a ride by various Washington DC shysters. Except that the Saudis are not "newly" rich... They've had plenty of time to realize they need to protect themselves from the Gucci-loafered shysters of Washington's K Street.
Look, let's lay aside morality for one small moment, and look at this question purely on technical grounds. Do you know who was the best foreign "operator" in the past quarter-century in Washington DC, in the city's own sleazy terms of influence-peddling, schmoozing, and generally getting ahead?
No question but that it was the late Nizar Hamdoun, who through the 1980s was Iraq's Ambassador to Washington and had the somewhat unenviable task of trying to "sell" Iraq to a generally very hostile crowd there.
Hamdoun, an extremely canny and fairly charming person, knew how to take a bad case and a big budget and make the budget work for him. He courted everyone, right across the political spectrum, with small dinners, semi-open policy round-tables, and plenty of dosh to throw around. I think he even succeeded in persuading Danny Pipes and Laurie Mylroie to go to Baghdad for a "high-level briefing", after which those two came back to DC to advocate for an audacious new pipeline scheme that Saddam was trying to organize.
(The pipeline would have gone down to Aqaba, Jordan, but crucially it was thought to require a guarantee from the Israelis that they wouldn't bomb it before the investors would shell out the money... The appropriately named "Pipes" helped the Iraqis to get Israel's Shimon Peres involved in the scheme. It was 1985. The plan went nowhere-- though intriguingly, a very similar plan is now being peddled once again... Of course, shortly after 1985, both Pipes and Mylroie turned against Saddam in a big, big way. That development had something of the psychology of a major love-affair that all went bitterly wrong...)
Anyway, the man who brought it all together in DC for Saddam's regime in those days was Nizar Hamdoun. And yes, "bringing it all together" certainly also included those visits that Donald Rumsfeld was making to Baghdad at exactly the time that Saddam was busy using chemical weapons against Iranians and Kurds...
Hamdoun died of leukemia a few years ago. But not until after many, many of his high-ranking American friends had intervened to try to get him to high-end doctors in New York, etc.
Yes, he was, from a purely technical point of view, an outstandingly "capable" diplomat.
And now, there are the Saudis...
I invite you to enjoy with me the idiocy, the sheer, breathtaking vacuity, and the near-total nullity that characterize the press release that Qoprvis Communications sent me today:
Text starts:
Weekly publication of the Information Office of the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia in Washington, DC
April 12, 2005. So it drops into my mail-box April 15. So why the delay, huh?
TERRORISM
A very important category this, one that the Saudis have evidently decided to focus on.
THREE MOST-WANTED TERRORISTS KILLED
Saudi security forces have killed three more terrorists on the Kingdom’s list of 26 most-wanted that was issued in December 2003, bringing to 23 the total number of killed or captured. Two of them, Saud Homood Obaid Alqotaini Alotaibi (#20) and Kareem Altohami Almojati (#12), were killed during the three-day standoff that began on April 3 in the city of Ar-Rass, in Qasim Province.
A three-day stand-off? (Or more likely, four?) The ability of the armed oppositionists to keep going that long was actually a major embarrassment for the Kingdom. They'd probably have done better not to remind people of how long it took them to regain control...
This incident resulted in a total of 15 killed, with five arrested and one surrendering. The third, Abdulrahman Mohammad Yazji (#24) was killed in Riyadh in a clash with a security patrol on April 6; a suspect with him was arrested. In all, over the four days, 16 militants were killed and 7 arrested. On April 9 the Interior Ministry published the names and brief bios of 11 of the dead and 3 of those in custody.
[For this list, see the Embassy website, http://www.saudiembassy.net]
That looked like a clickable link there but it did not work. I copy-&-pasted the URL into my browser, went there, and discovered brief bios for 10 not eleven of those killed and three of those arrested. It also said: "To be announced later are the names of the other five suspects killed, the two arrested, and the one who surrendered."
Crown Prince Abdullah and Prince Sultan have both praised the prudence of the security officers in the Ar-Rass incident in giving priority to evacuating residents. There were no fatalities among the security officers, although at least ten were hospitalized. Seized in the Ar-Rass raid were quantities of weapons, explosives, and equipment, incriminating documents and cash.
CROWN PRINCE URGES FIGHT AGAINST DEVIANT IDEAS
Well, this looks interesting. What kind of "deviance" was he talking about, I wonder?
Crown Prince Abdullah has called for measures to combat deviant ideas by carrying out cultural and educational programs that explain the true teachings of Islam and drive home the merits of moderation and tolerance, declaring that there can be no acceptance of any aberration of Islamic principles.
I'm still no clearer what kind of deviance they're talking about. I suspect it isn't sexual-- but who knows?
GOVERNMENT
SHURA COUNCIL EXPANDED TO 150 MEMBERS
Membership of the Consultative Council (Majlis Al-Shura) has been expanded from 120 to 150 in addition to the Chairman Dr. Salih bin Abdullah bin Homaid and Dr. Salih bin Abdullah bin Mansour Al-Malik as Secretary-General. On April 12, King Fahd swore in the members for the Council’s fourth four-year term. At the Council of Ministers meeting on April 11, Crown Prince Abdullah commended the achievements of the Shura Council, saying it has made effective decisions in the best interests of the homeland and its citizens.
And the achievements and decisions of this Consultative Council were.... ? Well, whatever they were, Qorvis Communications is not about to tell us...
ECONOMY
SAUDI STOCK MARKET’S TASI CONTINUES TO BREAK RECORDS
The Saudi stock market recorded an all-time high when the Tadawul All Share Index (TASI) closed on April 7 at 11,694.84 points, a rise of 11.49 percent over the week before. The total value of shares exchanged amounted to over U.S.$22 billion, up $1 billion from last week.
Good, now we get more specific. Money!!! But not a whole lot more specific, I'd say.
SOCIAL
KING FAISAL INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2005 WINNERS HONORED
The awards ceremony for the winners of the 28th annual King Faisal International Prize was held on April 9. This year the prize for Arabic Language and Literature was withheld, none of the entries qualifying. The prize for Service to Islam was jointly awarded to Dr. Ahmad Muhammad Ali, President of the Jeddah-based Islamic Development Bank (IDB), for his achievements in Islamic banking; and to the Al-Hariri Foundation of Lebanon for its promotion of Islamic education and culture.
The prize for Islamic Studies was awarded to Professor Carole Hillenbrand of the University of Edinburgh, for her clarification of misconceptions about the Crusades. The prize for Medicine went to Sir Richard Doll and Sir Richard Peto of the Clinical Trial Service Unit (CTSU) at Oxford University, for their research linking tobacco with various diseases; and that for Science was jointly shared by Professors Federico Capasso and Frank Wilczek of the United States, and Anton Zeilinger of Austria, for their work in the field of physics.
Just physics? No details at all of what kind of physics?
[For details, see King Faisal Foundation website www.kff.com.]
That link did work. It sent me to a very lugubrious website in blurry dark tones of teal. I couldn't find out any more there, either, about the prize-winning work in physics.
* * *
This is distributed by Qorvis Communications, LLC on behalf of the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia. Additional information is available at the Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.
Halah Al-Jubeir
Director
Qorvis Communications
Aha! So that's who the mysterious "Halah" is who's been sending me all these emails... I wonder if she's any relative of Adel al-Jubeir, who's the chief foreign-policy advisor to Crown Prince Abdullah? Nah, that would be nepotism, wouldn't it, and I'm sure the Kingdom doesn't work like that at all...
1201 Connecticut Ave, NW, Suite 300
Washington, DC 20036
...
halah@qorvis.com
"Communications for Wall Street, K Street and Main Street"
This email may contain confidential and privileged material for the sole use of the intended recipient(s). Any review, use, distribution or disclosure by others is strictly prohibited.
But apparently use by the recipients, like the present use, is just fine... Right, Halah?
I'm writing a column for Al-Hayat today. About US politics, attitudes to Iraq (maybe), that kind of thing.
I just found this web-page, from The Polling Report, Inc., which looks fairly useful. It aggregates data from a number of opinion-polling firms on US public attitudes on Iraq-related issues.
I find all the info presented there really interesting-- both the results of recent "in-depth" surveys, such as are found toward the bottom of the page, and the time-series data presented at the top.
For example, from the top, here's the CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll, conducted April 1-2, 2005:
Approve: 43%; Disapprove: 54%; Unsure: 3%.
(And you thought the election in Iraq was about Iraqi politics?? Hah!)
But his approval ratings on Iraq are not yet back down to where they were in May and June last year (41%). That was in the immediate aftermath of both the messy and widespread battles of April 2004 and the revelations about the tortures in Abu Ghraib.
The absolute high-point for Bush's approval rating regarding his handling of Iraq came-- not surprisingly-- in April 2003: 76% approval.
Okay, I need to go look at more polls on other issues, too. But that page certainly looked worth bookmarking for future reference.
Folks who made a donation to the campaign mounted by the Jarrar family of Baghdad to get urgently needed medical supplies to Iraqis in distress should check out the entries for today on Raed Jarrar's blog.
Taken together, these blog posts give you both copies of the receipts Raed and his friends got from the drugstore in Amman, Jordan where they bought many or all of the med supplies, and then a photo essay on moving these numerous bulky items through, as Raed says, "my mother's apartment".
Each image is posted as a separate post which makes it a little hard to link to the whole sequence. But the whole series is worth looking at and shows some really wonderful young people working together on this project. Just keep on scrolling down...
This trans-shipment was taking place in Amman, a fairly good place from which to get things into Iraq (especially cities west of Baghdad like Fallujah, Ramadi, etc.) Raed's mom Faiza has been living in Amman for a few weeks now. At the end of the photo-essay you see the group's four big cars loaded with supplies "leaving for Baghdad".
I particularly liked the picture titled "my mom was totally shocked when she woke up and found the house FULL of medicens boxes!!" Go, Faiza!
I realize that what Raed and his family and friends have gathered together is only a drop in the bucket of the total needs. But even one drop in the bucket is better than none! And they are showing the way for all concerned individuals and groups.
You can still contribute to these great people's ongoing campaign through the Paypal button on the sidebar of Raed's blog.
My column in Thursday's CSM on the Iraqi transition is now up on their website. I've also archived it here.
Here's the core of what I'm writing:
In Washington, the Bush administration should issue an authoritative declaration that the US has no claims of its own on Iraq's territory or natural resources, and no desire to constrain the decisionmaking of a freely elected Iraqi parliament in any way. This would do a huge amount to reduce suspicions and tensions inside Iraq. It would also rightly focus the attentions of all Iraqis on finding a good formula for getting along with one another rather than - as some have done - relying on US power to bolster their own group's position.
In Baghdad and Washington, meanwhile, policymakers should certainly consider tweaking the terms of the US-designed TAL so that what is drafted and voted on this year would be only an interim constitution, rather than the final thing. At the same time, the two planned end-of-2005 referenda could be consolidated into a single vote - which would be both a general vote of confidence in the interim constitution and the election of a sovereign democratic government based on it. Smaller details of the final constitution could be worked out later, and submitted to a referendum at that time.
Also, I think the point about the US making an authoritative "no lasting claims" declaration is really, really important. Why on earth don't they just do it?
That quote above, btw, above comes from a really excellent letter submitted to the Financial Times by Dr. Ian Rutledge, who describes himself as the author of a recently published book called Addicted to oil. (Memo to self: look for it. And hat-tip to Matt of Today in Iraq for the lead to Rutledge's letter.)
In the letter, Rutledge argued that one of the Bush administration's main motives in launching the invasion of Iraq had been to secure control of the Iraqi oil-fields and thus be able to start pumping an extra 2 million barrels of oil a day out of them to feed the world market (as well as, no doubt, the coffers of the US oil companies who'd be doing the pumping.)
But then,
I've been thinking through who suffers most from this. One group that evidently doesn't suffer are those who, like so many of George W. Bush's friends, have major investments in the US oil industry. All kinds of previously "marginal" drilling operations are now become daily ever more and more viable. Profits will do very well, thank you.
Ironic, isn't it, that the "big oil" folks stood to do very well indeed whether Bush's big gamble in Iraq turned out well, or not? Nah, maybe not "ironic", at all. More like, the way near-monopoly capitalism always works.
Inside the US, who suffers most, I think, are the rural poor-- people who have zero access to public transportation and are absolutely forced to use their cars to pursue even the most basic activities of daily life. Lots of folks, including poor folks, inside US cities don't have access to public transport either, because of the country's extremely strong tilt toward automobilocracy.
Globally, though, the effects are far, far worse. Especially for the hundreds of millions of residents of the very poor parts of the world. How on earth can their trucking companies survive? How can their farmers get their goods to market? How can their infant industries survive, with gas prices expected to remain at or above their present levels?
If the people in power in the world truly thought of all of humankind as a single "human family", then surely this is an issue we'd expect the whole "family" to come together to deal with right now.
Starting by dealing with the miscreant family member who thought he'd go out and smash up an oil-producing country in the Middle East from a mixture of personal motives, from recklessness, and almost as a "lark".
This same family member, moreover, is one that has been hogging and wilfully wasting this vital global resource for many decades now.
... Well, I'm not going to sit around waiting for the "community of nations" to start calling Uncle Sam to account any day soon. But what everyone really does need to focus on is how to prevent the economic disaster now hitting the "very-low-income world" as a result of spiraling oil prices from causing even more privation, starvation, and human misery in those countries than their people are already suffering.
Ideas, anyone?
Rosa Prince of London Daily Mirror has reported that:
Contract tender forms for civilian workers disclose a huge expansion of interrogation and detention centres in Iraq to remain in place for a minimum four more years.
Prince adds that:
In a sign the US has learned from the Abu Ghraib jail scandal, in which prisoners were abused, the civilian interrogators will be trained in the Geneva Convention.
Warning of the dangers of the job, the document says: "No persons supporting operations will be allowed to reside off a US secure facility, or travel unless in a military secured convoy."
... The Army plans emerged the day after tens of thousands of Iraqis marched in Baghdad demanding the US quit.
Not just the French in Algeria (though that might be one place to start.) But the British in Malaya or Kenya, or any number of other places where the decaying colonial power wrought mayhem, crimes against humanity, and human tragedy on an almost unimaginable scale.
I see there are a couple of good new books out on Kenya. Including this one, by Caroline Elkins, on the desperate and extremely violent efforts the Brits made to hang onto colonial rule in Kenya... One of their main tools in this was a horrific, mass-scale detention system called mere "the 'Pipeline'."
It didn't work. Kenya became independent. But how many scores of thousands of human lives were lost or blighted forever along the way?
People around the world need to learn or re-learn the terrible history of such ventures.
A new 'Pipeline' in Iraq?? It's an outrage.
The article on Hizbullah that I worked on over the Christmas holiday weeks has finally come out. It's in the April-May issue of Boston Review.
Knowing that the text would look a little outdated by the time it came out, I'd begged the copy editor to put a date at the bottom of the piece, which I think is a very classy way of "signing off". To no avail. For your information I signed off on that text on March 18th or so.
I also asked 'em to put a reference to JWN in my tag-line (the two-line piece of biographical identifier they use there.) Again, no dice. Oh well, next time.
Anyway, I don't mean to carp. I always love working with the folks at BR. Josh Cohen, one of the Editors, is a brillant and widely published theoretician of democracy who has also been the chair of the departments of both Politics and Philosophy at MIT. Deb Chasman, the other Editor, is another really great person to work with. Working with super-competent editors is a real joy. (Yes, even when they cut one-third of the my original draft out "for length reasons"...) There aren't many great editors out there-- people who really work with a writer to hone the meaning of the words, the balance of the sentence structure, the flow of the meta-narrative, and the broad thrust of the argument.
Josh Friedman, the Managing Editor, was also good to work with. (Even though he did cut out my footnotes completely. My footnotes! Imagine!)
Well, in case any of you wants to delve into my footnotes, I'm going to upload the last footnoted version I have on my desktop-- from February 12. That was two days before Rafiq Hariri was killed, so it underwent a bit of updating between then and March 18th. But if you're a footnote sleuth as I am, you might enjoy some of these ones. Here it is.
Today, the "Democracy denied in Iraq" counter stands at 71 days. That is exactly one-third of the 213-day period allowed by Paul Bremer's "Transitional Administrative Law" for the National Assembly elected January 30th, and the government accountable to it, to work on drafting Iraq's new Constitution.
And the government hasn't even been formed yet!
It's not clear how much longer this might take. Allawi throwing his hat in the ring as a wannabe government member will probably complicate the government-formation negotiations yet further...
I'm working really hard on thinking through a column on this whole topic for my column in this Thursday's CSM.
To be frank, I feel kind of torn. I think it's really important to get the Constitution "right", to have it well negotiated among representative leaders, and I don't think that process should be rushed by the pressure of externally imposed deadlines. On the other hand, I think it's really important for the Iraqis to be able to exercise sovereign self-government absolutely as rapidly as possible, and that nothing-- least of all any actions undertaken by the US-- should stand in the way of that.
I'm getting close toward formulating a proposal that I think can meet both those needs. But I'll probably be up late tonight...
AFP reported yesterday that,
About two-thirds are locked up as "security detainees" without any formal charges in US-run facilities, Lieutenant Colonel Guy Rudisill, the US military spokesman for Iraqi detention operations, told AFP.
The rest are incarcerated in Iraqi-run jails in conditions that fall well below any international standard and are in dire need of reform, said Bakhtiar Amin, Iraq's outgoing human rights minister.
The report quotes Amin as saying that, "There are currently 6,504 inmates in Iraq's 18 prisons, 2,573 of whom have already been sentenced," and explaining that that number includes both "common criminals" and "terrorists."
Amin also said that the British troops are detaining 27 people. (An interesting low figure, that; most likely linked to the British forces' markedly different approach to the whole politics of trying to run the occupation. Also, maybe showing they learned some useful lessons from Northern Ireland? See below.)
My reading of the report is (from Rudesill) that none of those detained by the Americans have actually been convicted of any crime, but are still only suspects. (In international law, that is the most common meaning of the term "detainee", as opposed to "convict" or "prisoner.)
That means that from the 17,000 people being held by US, UK, and Iraqi forces, only the mentioned 2,573 have been sentenced. That means that 14,400 Iraqis are being forcibly held with trial.
This is absolutely no way to build a democracy.
The AFP story from Baghdad notes that the present figure of 14,400 Iraqis detained without trial is a record high for the whole period of the US/UK occupation. Prior to last April's revelation of the Abu GHraib scandal the high of total detainees (sentenced and unsentenced) had been 8,000. After the Abu Ghraib revelations, an effort was made to scale back the number of detainees. Last November, before the US assault on Fallujah, the number was "about 5,000".
Since November, it has just about tripled!
The report also notes laconically that after the Abu Ghraib scandal, "US military officers admitted that many detainees were being held on weak evidence that would not stand up in a regular court of law."
On March 30, when the number held by the US forces in Iraq was reported as 10,200, the New York-based NGO Human Rights First issued a sobering report on US detention operations there and in Afghanistan.
HRF program director Deborah Pearlstein said in the press conference that launched the report, "One of the concerning developments we're seeing as U.S. detention operations in these places mature is a trend toward greater secrecy, not less."
The report itself judged that U.S. detention operations "appear[ed] to be picking up permanence and pace.”
Regarding the treatment of detainees at the hands of the Interim Iraqi Government, a Human Rights Watch report issued in late January found that, " Iraqi security forces are committing systematic torture and other abuses against people in detention.
A summary provided in an accompanying media release spelled out that,
For Iraqis and everyone else concerned about the country, of course, some of these abuses are very familiar indeed from those perpetrated under Saddam's regime, which did all those things as well as things that were very much worse indeed. (For a quick catalogue, go here, and check down the list of 'annual reports' links there, going back to 1989.)
Is there some hope that as leaders more legitimate than Iyad Allawi take over the reins of government in Iraq, the way the new "transitional" government treats is citizenry will become less barbaric?
Let's hope so. The former Human Rights Minister Bakhtiar Amin, who I think is Kurdish, seems like a brave, principled soul, in which case it would be excellent if he were kept on.
One can always hope that leaders elected by populations that have themselves been massively mistreated in the past may emerge from that experience with a stronger appreciation of the value of upholding high human-rights norms.
Unfortunately, that doesn't always happen. Quite frequently, leaders of traumatized populations-- individuals who may well themselves have been tortured in the past-- end up simply re-enacting the violence they previously suffered against people who later come under their own power. (A sad version of the boss bullies employee, employee goes home and beats wife syndrome.)
But we can always hope for the best... We can also work hard with our friends in Iraq (and elsewhere) to try to implement high human rights standards including through putting in place thorough systems of safeguards to guard against transgressions by individuals in power who may indeed feel a need to take some form of "revenge" on those who come into their hands.
But what chance is there of such a rights-respecting system emerging in Iraq while the ever-present American "Big brother" is still around, and still massively abusing the rights of the Iraqi people including of more than 10,000 Iraqi detainees held without trial?
Absolutely minimal, I would say.
I apologize to readers that I have at least two known stalkers operating on the Comments boards of the blog. These two individuals call themselves Razavipour and E. Bilpe (sometimes also known as "Other"). Raza distinguishes himself by lengthy rants frequently posted in all bold.
I have tried to ban their IPs since they have contravened the blog's clearly posted guidelines for commenters. But they slide around into different IPs and continue to try to clog up the JWN comments boards with their lengthy, frequently hate-filled, seemingly demented, or ad-feminam/ad-hominem rantings.
I apologize for the nuisance they constitute. My tech advisor, legal advisor, and I will work together to see what our further options are. Any suggestions from bona-fide readers will be welcome.
I shall continue trying to delete these people's unwanted incursions onto my bandwidth whenever I can. Meantime, please just ignore them.
Estimating the numbers of people who take part in big political gatherings is never an exact science, but it's important to try to get the best "ballpark figure" available.
As far as I can see, almost no-one in the mainstream media did anything to estimate the number of people taking part in Moqtada Sadr's "big" anti-occupation demonstration in central Baghdad yesterday. I checked many, many news sources for a figure today. All except one stuck with the highly non-specific "ten of thousands" figure.
Okay, guys, so how many ten of thousands? It must have been more than "one". So what was it-- two? three? twenty? fifty?
The only report I found that was more specific than that was this report, from the LA Times's Edmund Sanders in Baghdad, which said,
That would make it "thirty" tens of thousands, if you do the math.
I wish, though, that Sanders had been more specific about the nature of the "sources" from which he got those estimates. Were they strongly pro-Sadrist sources? Were they sources close to the US or emerging Iraqi military? I think that matters.
I should imagine the US military were counting the crowd more closely than anyone else. Journos on the spot and in the Pentagon should demand to know what the military's estimate of the number was. This does matter. It's an important political fact. And if the US military has counted (or given their best estimate for) the number, that figure should be released as public knowledge, together with a description of their methodology.
Okay, here's my best attempt and my methodology, doing the job from 7,000 miles away. I looked at these photos of the demonstration, and read various news reports that said that Firdaws Square was full and there were additional people standing on side streets as well. (You can kind of see the square being full from those photos... Unlike on April 9, 2003...) I reckon you couldn't fill Firdaws Square at that apparent density of people with less than around 80,000 people. So as a very first estimate I'd say it's very extremely likely that that one demonstration had over 100,000 people in it.
Plus, there were additional demonstrations-- apparently smaller-- in (at least) Ramadi and Najaf.
As I said, counting crowds an inexact science-- especially for me, since I'm so far away and don't have access to surveillance choppers or drones, such as the US military has there all the time.
Wire service reporters etc there in Baghdad presumably had access to many more photos than the handful I could look at. Plus, perhaps they could have gone to the rally themselves???
I don't think that's asking too much of them. Or, as a substitute for that if they were truly scared to, they could have sent some of the Iraqi reporters who, let's face it, do nearly all the truly valuable reporting and cultural negotiation work there on contract for the western media, and get paid only a tiny proportion of the money that the "big" Western media honchos get.
But no. Nearly all the Baghdad-based reporters seemed to stick with not going to the demonstration, and endlessly parroting the same, highly misleading figure of "tens of thousands" of participants.
Get your boots on the ground, guys. Also, ask the US military for their estimate. Just parroting "ten of thousands" is a truly lousy reporting job.
With the relative success of the mass rally his people organized in Firdaws Square today, Shiite Muslim firebrand Moqtada Sadr looks set to change the main "frame" within which Iraqi politics has been cast from the frame of sectarian politics to that of a determinedly inter-sectarian nationalist (i.e. anti-occupation) campaign.
Ever since last December or so, the main way in which westerners (and, perhaps, many Iraqis) have been viewing Iraqi politics has been through the lens of sectarian/national-group competition... "Will 'the Sunnis' participate in the election or not?"... "Can 'the Shiites' make a post-electoral deal with 'the Kurds'?"... "How can the interests of 'the Sunnis' be accommodated in the post-Saddam order?" Etc., etc.
That trend seems to have served the interests of the occupation forces well, keeping as much attention as possible focused on the relative "shares" of power the big three population groups inside Iraq (and the other, smaller groups) could enjoy within the political "system" whose sum-total of powers and authorities the occupation forces have continued to keep tightly limited.
It also served the broader regional interests of the Bush administration. Describing what was happening in Iraq in mainly sectarian terms (the "rise of Shiite power") allowed Washington to monger huge fears of this trend among many Sunni powers in the region. (Not the least of them, Jordan's 'King' Abdullah, Saudi Arabia's 'Crown prince' Abdullah, etc.) The scene seemed about to be set to entrench a region-spanning fissure between Shiite Arabs-- including the Lebanese Shia, the Shia communities of eastern Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and other GCC countries and also, most likely, the sort-of-Shiite Alawis who monopolize power in Damascus-- and the very tired old Sunni powers, including the two just mentioned, the Egyptian regime, and some others.
Just think of the contrast between this sectarian view of the Middle East and the euphoria that swept through most of the Arab countries back in May 2000 when Hizbullah proved itself capable of pushing the Israeli army almost completely out of Lebanon.
Divide and rule, anyone?
(I recall that back on April 23, 2003, the Brookings Institution's Martin Indyk had openly advocated just such a policy, telling an audience that, "We have to get rid of this naive notion that by turning on the lights and fixing the hospitals we are going to be able to build a moderate, representative government in Iraq. We're going to have to play the old imperial game of divide and rule and the stakes could not be higher." It's true, Martin had been a leading Middle East advisor in the Clinton, not the Bush, administration... So if that was what even the long-time Clintonites were advocating, you can bet that many people in Rumsfeld's Pentagon were also on the ball with implementing those thoughts right from the very beginning.)
But now, Moqtada seems to be having some success in his attempt to change the subject back to that of ending the occupation...
Both AP and the BBC are reporting that some "tens of thousands" of Iraqis responded to Moqtada's call for mass demonstrations around anti-occupation slogans to gather in Baghdad's Firdaws Square and other points around Iraq today.
Yes, it's true that turnout there fell far beneath the "million-person" target Moqtada had set for the action. But the crowd was many, many times bigger than the totally staged "rally" that the US forces and a few dazed-looking, just-returned Iraqi exiles staged in the same square two years ago today... That was the one in which US military vehicles were employed in helping topple the statue of Saddam...
In today's demonstration, AP reported that:
"Force the occupation to leave from our country," one banner read in English.
The Shiite protesters also called for the now-jailed Saddam to face justice, and they held up framed photos of al-Sadr's father, a prominent cleric executed by Saddam. Mahdi Army militiamen searched people entering the demonstration area as Iraqi policemen stood to the side.
The question of how many Sunnis participated in the main Sadrist rally is interesting, and murky. Before the demonstration, Jazeera reported that,
"Many of our brothers, including Sunnis, have welcomed the call and will take part," said Shaikh Abd al-Hadi al-Daraji, a spokesman for al-Sadr. "We hope it's going to be one million people strong."
... And the imams of the Shiite and Sunni mosques in Baghdad yesterday called Iraqis to take part in today's demonstration.
The head of the (Sunni)Association of Muslim Scholars Sheikh Harith al-Dari said in his Friday sermon in the Um al-Qurra mosque west of Baghdad, "I call on all Iraqis to all go out tomorrow in peaceful demonstrations against the occupation."
And he called on the Iraqi people to "Speak their piece with one tongue: 'No to the occupation' and that the occupation must go."
Dari made clear that, "It's the duty of Iraqis to express this in practice. They must shout with one voice and go out tomorrow in demonstrations in all the cities of Iraq from Basra in the south to Dohuk in the north to say 'Enough' of games and playing around, Enough of raising unclear slogans, slogans of sectarianism, and watered-down slogans."
He added, "I beg [the people of] all Iraqi cities that they go out to express their loathing of the occupation and everything that it has caused."
Moqtada has been notable, within the Shiite community, for three things over the past 18 months:
(2) His focus on, and success in, grassroots organizing within the Shiite community. If you haven't read the great piece that Anthony Shadid had in Friday's WaPo, you should do so quickly before they take it offline. Bottom line: Beyond Baghdad... Iraqis see a new boldness in the militia in cities like Nasiriyah, Basra and Amarah, all south of the capital and all patrolled by foreign forces allied with the United States. In Basra, the [Sadrist] Mahdi Army is widely viewed as the force that can put more armed men in the street than any other. Amarah remains its stronghold. In Nasiriyah, it has struck an alliance with the secular police chief, who views the group as a counterweight to other militias. "The silent majority is not with him, but the majority of active people are," said Ayatollah Mohammed Taqi Mudarrassi, a cleric in Karbala, referring to Sadr. "If you count the ballot boxes, the balance is with the moderates. If you count those in the streets, it's the opposite." The enduring appeal of Sadr's militia speaks to the forces still shaping Iraq: nationalism, religion and guns. And,
(3) His insistence on not "playing any games" with the occupation, in terms of seeing it as "a necessary presence, in the short term, in order to protect 'my' community from that 'other' community"... In other words, the classic kind of a game that a policy of 'divide and rule' seeks to set in motion... All the high-up figures from the pols elected on January 30 have joined that game to one degree or another since late December-- no doubt, to the delight of Donald Rumsfeld. Sadr has always refused to play it; and now he's coming out on the streets in conjunction with leading parts of the Sunni community to openly demand the end of the occupation.
The violence in Iraq has not ended, by any means. Just yesterday, one of Sadr's organizers traveling from the south to attend today's demonstration, was gunned down along the road. There are still extremists and hoodlums out there, all of them enabled and empowered by the continuing crisis in public security and some of them probably set in motion by heinous, behind-the-scenes forces.
But if the main trend within Iraq's Sunni and Shiite communities can be swung toward the concept of peaceful mass action, then there is a hope there (as in Lebanon) that the people intent on fomenting violence, hatred, and social breakdown can become marginalized and defeated.
Regarding peaceful mass actions and Shiite-Sunni collaboration on an anti-"imperial" agenda, I note too that in Lebanon Hizbullah has been paying a lot of attention to trying to restore relations with the local Sunni community that had become frayed (or worse?) as a result of the whole Hariri issue...
And in Gaza and the West Bank, Hamas has been showing a whole new stress on organizing peaceful mass demonstrations in various parts of the occupied territories... But the situation there is so explosive in general, with the extremist Israeli settlers apparently about to hold a huge rally in Jerusalem and Israeli troops having just killed three Palestinian youths in southern Gaza... Who knows what will happen there in the next 48 hours?
A correction: I have just looked again through some of AP's gallery of photos of the Hamas marches in the occupied territories. They certainly don't all look peaceful. I also noticed for the first time that the Fateh-linked Al-Aqsa Brigades people pictured there were wearing yellow bands and had yellow flags. In that part of the world yellow is overwhelmingly associated with Lebanon's Hizbullah.
To mark the passing of Pope John Paul II, I want to pay tribute to the work much of the Catholic church did under his leadership in the field of peacemaking.
During Washington's ever-more-ominous preparations to launch the fateful March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Pope spoke out repeatedly against the madness of war. See, e.g., here and here.
That latter link is to the text of an address the Pope made on January 13, 2003 to the diplomatic corps in the Vatican. In it, he said:
(Unlike too many people in the United States today, who have no real idea of what war does to a homeland... This is both because the US has not known war in its own homeland since the civil war of the mid-19th century, and because too many Americans seem to lack the moral imagination to even try to think of what it's like to live--as most Iraqis are nowadays forced to-- without public security and with interruptions in vital services that pose a constant threat to public health and to the survival of many of the country's physically weaker souls.)
Anyway, since I've been working all this week on the portion of my current book project that deals with Mozambique, I also wanted to share a little portion of the book that describes the signal role that the Rome-based Catholic lay organization Sant' Egidio played in shepherding the 1992 General Peace Agreement which brought an end to 15 years of horrendous, extremely atrocious civil war inside that country.
(I have such deep admiration for our friends of Sant' Egidio! I wish we Quakers were one-tenth as committed and as effective in our peacemaking! Oh well, we can all try to do our best, I guess.)
The following excerpt comes from Chapter 8, "Mozambique from war to peacemaking":
How the conflict was ended
As described above, the General Peace Agreement (GPA) of October 1992 was the fruit of a lengthy interaction between the two fighting parties that had been launched, though only very tentatively, with the peace feelers of 1988. A number of aspects of this negotiation were significant, including the following:
• its principal outside sponsor was a low-profile non-governmental group that had its own very constructive views of how successful negotiations should be pursued, and of the appropriate role for a sponsoring organization such as theirs;
• the peace plan that emerged was explicitly linked to the provision of a process for the peaceful, democratic reconciliation of political differences in the out years;
• the non-governmental sponsors were able to engage external governmental and UN backing for the peace process as it became necessary; and
• this backing could be offered before the question of war-crimes prosecutions became a prominent concern of the international community.
When President Joaquim Chissano reached out through the Protestant church leaders to the Renamo leaders in 1988, he probably judged that Renamo still enjoyed considerable foreign backing; but on this occasion he was reaching out to Renamo qua Renamo, even though this was a very controversial thing to do in most Frelimo circles. For more than a decade by then, Frelimo's ideology had tarred Renamo as being nothing more than a gang of law-breaking bandidos armados whose only "political" agenda was dictated by outside hands. In reaching out to Renamo qua Renamo, and holding out the hope of a negotiated, political settlement with it, Chissano was according Renamo more stature as a legitimately Mozambican force that was pursuing a possibly legitimate political agenda within the country than many Frelimo people were happy with. (When I spoke with long-time Frelimo central committee member Marcelino Dos Santos in 2003, he still said, "I will never speak about a 'civil war' in Mozambique. It was a war against South Africa. They fought a war against Mozambique through an instrument called Renamo." Indeed, the fact that Renamo did not hold any political congresses of its own until early 1990 somewhat validates this view that prior to that date it had been mainly a proxy force for outside powers.) However, once the majority of Frelimo's leaders had decided they wanted to try to negotiate a peace with Renamo they realized they would need to ramp down their previous demonization of it as a necessarily illegitimate force, and start thinking about Renamo's people as, first and foremost, fellow-countrymen. Renamo's leaders had to undertake a similar shift: from describing the Freliomo government as an illegitimate, Moscow-imposed "tool" of Soviet imperialism, to granting it recognition as being composed of "fellow-countrymen". The new ideology of "fellow-countrymen" took some time to take root, but as it did it helped to color many other aspects of the negotiations.
Anglican Archbishop Dinis Sengulane was one of the leaders of the (Protestant) 'Christian Council of Mozambique' who went to Kenya to meet with the Renamo leaders in 1988. I met him in 2003 in his church's slightly run-down headquarters complex in a busy part of Maputo. "The leaders of the churches had been going to visit President Chissano periodically since 1984," he explained.
The thing to note is that that peacemaking process was indeed very successful. Since 1992, Mozambique has seen three rounds of generally free and fair democratic elections. Renamo, which had been responsible for truly unspeakable atrocities during the civil-war years, has become institutionalized into its role as a purely political opposition party. And though the country is still--after 400 years of Portuguese colonial rule, preceded by several centuries in which it was the target of slave-raiding by both Arab and European enslavers, and followed by 15-plus years of bitter civil war fomented by the vicious White minority regimes in Rhodesia and apartheid-era South Africa--dirt-poor, and suffering badly from massive under-development, it is basically peaceful and stable, and the vast majority of its people lead basically decent lives.
What a gift the church-based peacemakers gave them by facilitating that negotiation process. What great people those church leaders-- inside Mozambique and outside it-- turned out to be.
Regarding Sant' Egidio, their home community in Rome-- the one that hosted the Mozambique peace talks-- had been founded with the direct interest of the Pope, and its members always tried to live out his (and their) vision of God's will for the church.
Let's hope the new pope will continue, and further build on, this peacemaking tradition.
So there was Israel's figurehead president, Moshe Katsav, at the Pope's funeral in Rome, reaching out to shake hands not only with Iranian President Muhammad Khatemi but also with Syria's Bashar al-Asad.
(That's one thing big state funerals are excellent for: throwing unlikely seatmates close to each other.)
The BBC, citing israel radio, reported that,
The Syrian president was seated one row behind Mr Katsav.
The report said Mr Assad later initiated a second handshake as the funeral ended.
Mr Katsav, who was born in Iran, is also reported to have exchanged words in his native Farsi with the Iranian President, Mohammad Khatami.
Later, Katsav, who has no executive power but is reported to be widely respected in Israel, told a web-reporter for the Israeli daily Maariv that he had
Moshe Katsav rejected Israeli official objections which said Syria's overture transmitted via UN Middle East envoy Terje Roed-Larsen was insignificant.
"In my opinion it is important and worthwhile to thoroughly check out the intentions of (Syrian President) Assad," he told the Maariv daily.
Mr Assad said he was willing to resume talks with Israel without conditions.
A return to Israeli-Syrian negotiations? Who knows? The two parties got very close indeed to a final peace agreement back when Rabin and Peres were prime ministers in Israel, in 1994-96. In 1994 Rabin gave the Clinton administration an undertaking called "the pocket" that informed the Americans that actually, deep down, his government was indeed ready to withdraw from all the territory of Syrian Golan that Israel had held under military occupation since the June war of 1967-- though in return for a full peace and some fairly severe disarmament conditions that Syria would have to abide by.
Then, Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist (November 1995). Then, Peres somewhat seriously misplayed his political hand and lost the election of June 1996. Then, Bibi Netanyahu took "the pocket" off the table. (That much, you can read about in my 2000 book that covered the negotiations from 1991-96.)
Then, in 1999, Mr. Wise-Guy Ehud Barak was elected PM in Israel. However he was just a little too big for his boots, that one, and thought he could pull something off with the older President Asad by sort of pretending to put "the pocket" back on the table, but actually not doing so. (He'd skimmed a vital hundred-meter-wide strip off what he was prepared to "give back" to Syria, running around the northeast segment of the Sea of Galilee/Lake Kinneret. Did he think Hafez al-Asad wouldn't notice the difference?)
Well, so then Hafez al-Asad keeled over and died. Ehud Barak was such an incompetent pol that he completely lost his ruling coalition in almost record time for Israel and then lost an election to Ariel Sharon.... And there things have stood till now.
I personally don't expect a big change. But I'd love to be proved wrong.
I got my paper copy of the April-May issue of Boston review in the middle of the week. It has my big piece on Hizbullah in it. It looks pretty good, except they insisted I take out the footnotes. Waaaah! I love footnotes! A writer can have an entirely different kind of a conversation with the reader if she is allowed to use footnotes... But no. The copy-editor, Josh Friedman, said they "want to look more like the Atlantic Monthly", or something.
Oh well. Even worse news is that they haven't put my piece up on the website yet. I thought maybe when they do, I'll upload my footnoted version here, and y'all can choose which one you want to read.
Meanwhile, however, Roula Khalaf of the Financial Times has snagged an intriguing interview with Hizbullah #2 Sheikh Naim Qassim, in which he suggests that Hizbullah could find a formula for its militia to coordinate even more closely with, or become a "reserve wing" of, the Lebanese Army-- but not until after Israel pulls its forces out of the Shebaa Farms district, a tiny and almost unpopulated portion of land that both Lebanon and Syria say is Lebanese, but Israel and the UN say is Syrian.
Khalaf writes:
...The sticking point is likely to be Shebaa Farms, occupied by Israel but claimed by Lebanon. “We will discuss [Hizbollah's] arms after Shebaa but on condition that a credible alternative is found to protect Lebanon. A reservist army doesn't mean the resistance becomes part of the army but it's a formula of co-ordination with the army. It's resistance by another name.”
It could, however, be a neat way for both Hizbullah and the Lebanese government to end up in formal compliance with the (extremely intrusive and bossy) stipulation in Security Council resolution 1559 that calls for the disarming of all Lebanese militias (i.e., Hizbullah's, since that is the only one.)
In my article-- when y'all can read it!-- you will see that one of the main arguments I make is that it was Hizbullah's extremely effective political organizing throughout the 1990s that assured it of victory in the decisive battle that Israel forced upon it in 1996-- the battle that clearly paved the way for Hizbullah's landmark victory in 2000 in bringing about a near-total (or total, if you don't count Shebaa Farms) withdrawal of the IDF/IOF forces from Lebanon on a completely unilateral basis.
So yes, Hizbullah's smart and youthful party bosses certainly do know a thing or two about political organizing.
Khalaf writes,
“Hizbollah has to do more to make up for this political loss and this is what we're doing with our political activities in the last two months.” He said it was “possible” that Hizbollah would one day join the government a move that it has avoided until now.
“But we haven't decided yet. Being in the government is tied to the type of government and to its programme and to our ability to influence it.” Last month Hizbollah staged a massive street demonstration in central Beirut to counter the protests of the opposition and strengthened its alliance with the “loyalists”, the pro-Syrian parties.
At the same time, however, it initiated a dialogue with the anti-Syrian opposition. Hizbollah leaders now have almost daily meetings with opposition figures.
The opposition has been divided over whether Hizbollah should be disarmed. But in recent days some prominent opposition leaders have issued statements to reassure the party that the fate of its military wing will be decided in an internal dialogue and without international interference.
“The other elements of 1559 are domestic Lebanese issues and the Lebanese voice is now almost in consensus that Hizbollah's arms would be discussed between the Lebanese without going back to the UN resolution,” said Mr Qassim. “So we don't consider that we're confronting the international community because we're applying an understanding between the Lebanese.”
“But they don't understand the problem it's occupation and Israeli expansionist ambitions and they're not treating the problem. They want to break the ability of any group to confront Israel and this is something we reject.”
But the "big" bottom line there is that once Israel is ready to conclude a serious peace agreement with Syria-- on the only legitimate basis for such a peace to be concluded, i.e. land for peace-- then whether Shebaa Farms is Syrian or Lebanese will become truly a matter for only those two countries to worry about. The only reason it's an "international" issue at all these days is because Israel wants to hold onto all of the occupied Golan area of Syria's national territory for as long as it can, and it claims that Shebaa Farms is part of that territory, not part of Lebanon...
(See next post)
Jalal Talabani was sworn in as Iraq's President just now, and he then immediately (or, not quite immediately enough) named Ibrahim al-Jaafari as Prime Minister.
According to the TAL, this is what now happens (that link goes to an AP summary, not the original TAL):
The "Democracy denied in Iraq" counter will continue.
Who knows whether Jaafari and Talabani will be able to agree on a government list rapidly, slowly, or indeed at all?
Meantime, the Bremer-appointed Allawi continues to "run" things. (I.e., control the patronage machine, rake in the dough, and try to keep his hangers-on in and his enemies out of sensitive and/or lucrative positions.)
It looks as though-- under the TAL-- Jaafari still needs to go through Talabani to get his list to the Assembly. Will Talabani be helpful or obstructive in this process? Let's hope the former.
But it wasn't a good omen that he "forget" to even mention the naming of Jaafari until after most of the assembled t.v. cameras had stopped rolling.
There's a lovely piece in Thursday's Daily Star (Beirut) by Adnan El-Ghoul, titled John Paul II's legacy to Lebanon. I'm pretty certain Ghoul is a Sunni Muslim, which makes the piece all the more meaningful.
In it, he recalls the visit the Pope made to Lebanon in 1997:
... Eight years later, the number of Syrian troops has dropped from 40,000 to less than 8,000 and they are scheduled to leave by the end of this month. Israel pulled its troops out of South Lebanon and western Bekaa Valley in May 2000; at least according to the United Nations.
... So what difference did the pontiff's trip make to Lebanon? Did we have a Poland moment, where his visit glavanised his fellow countrymen to throw off the shackes of communism?
We didn't have the drama of a Polish moment, but in my view the papal visit did make a difference to this country. I would assert he actually helped establish a new political climate that paved the way for the current political uprising. He came here and said openly that Lebanon and the Lebanese needed to embrace change.
...[S]ince the papal visit many realities changed in accordance with the pope's wishes and guidance. He called for greater dialogue between this country's myriad of religions. In his document "A New Hope for Lebanon,'' he outlined the need for coexistance and for all Lebanese to look toward Lebanon for their future, calling all Lebanese to "open with confidence a new page in their history."
In this respect the visit laid the foundation for dialogue that helped trans-sectarian alliances and cooperation in this country which in turn has reaped rewards for Lebanon's political opposition. His plea for reconciliation was most plainly seen in the visit by Sfeir to the Chouf Mountains to meet with Walid Jumblatt for the first time since the civil war. That visit can arguably seen as the first seeds in the flowering of the broad based united Lebanese opposition that the country currently has.
The pope told the stadium crowd, speaking in French, "In this holy land, Christians, Muslims and Jews are called to work together with confidence and boldness and to work to bring about without delay the day when the legal rights of all peoples are respected and they can live in peace and mutual understanding."
Following in the steps of St. Paul, the pope's visit to Syria took him to a landscape rich in Christian history. Syria's 17 million people include two million Christians, and the pope's presence there highlighted the rich mix of cultures and history of Syria.
Pope John Paul traveled in what he called the Millennium Journey as a pilgrim to the Umayyad Mosque. He was the first pope to enter a mosque, stepping into a historic shrine alongside Muslim leaders.
By visiting Umayyad Mosque, in the heart of the Old City of Damascus, the pope made a point on how Christianity and the preceding Roman Empire, were deeply rooted in the Middle East.
The Umayyad Mosque has been a place of worship for more than 3,000 years...
One million people of all sects and religious beliefs attended the Sunday Mass the pope celebrated in Downtown Beirut close to Martyrs' Square. I was one of them. Less than eight years later one million people of all sects again filled Martyrs' Square to show their support to a united political opposition calling for Syrian withdrawal and political freedom.
What is John Paul's final legacy to Lebanon? I think we are seeing it: dialogue, tolerance, political freedom. As I write we seem to be on the verge of a return to sectarian rigidity and political bickering which looks set to threaten the principles outlined by the pope when he visited our small country.
The "Apostolic Guidance," which was published after his trip here would come in handy as a blueprint for containing the current political crisis before it develops into a communal conflict. It is worth reading now more than ever.
So finally today, 66 days after the January 30 election, the members of the National Assembly elected that day were able to reach agreement on an interim President, veteran PUK leader Jalal Talabani, and two Vice-President, slippery Shiite pol Adel Abdul-Mahdi and Sunni stuffed shirt (okay, stuffed jallabiya) Ghazi Yawar.
This article by Ed Wong on the NYT website today gives some interesting details about the Assembly session, including this:
The appointment of the three-person Presidential Council was a major "hump" in the road to government formation, since it required the Bremer-imposed two-thirds super-majority. That hump has now been passed. The Prez Council will now, I think, present its nominations for the prime minister and other ministers to the Assembly, where only a simple majority is required for passage.
That may happen as early as Thursday.
But will Iraq then get a Transitional Government that is both domestically legitimate and empowered (by the occupying force) to start ruling the country? That is really the question.
Until that happens, I think I'll keep the "Democracy Denied in Iraq" counter going.
By the way, in that AP/Yahoo story I linked to above, there's a fascinating little quote from Talabani that I consider to be a hopeful sign:
"As for the Iraqis who are carrying weapons out of patriotic and anti-occupation motives, those people are our brothers and it is possible to talk with them and to reach a solution," Talabani said.
He added that his government would work to provide security so that U.S.-led coalition forces "could return home after the completion of building (Iraqi) armed forces that are capable of finishing off terrorism."
It's great that, in rhetoric and also possibly in reality, Talabani is not presenting himself merely as a patsy for the occupation forces.
Also, that he seems to be aiming for, or prepared to accept, a complete withdrawal of US forces.
So the intra-Iraqi politics of this are getting interesting.
I'm afraid I have been too busy with other things to write much about Iraq recently. From one point of view, though, the ever-rising number on JWN's "Democracy denied in Iraq" counter says it all...
65 today!
So now, 30.5% of the total time allocated to reaching agreement on a permanent Constitution has already passed.
I strongly believe it is important that the Iraqi parties get this permanent Constitution "right"-- that is, to make sure it is one that the vast majority of Iraqi citizens feel comfortable with, going forward for-- say-- the next three generations. Crafting this Constitution should not necessarily be rushed to fit a Bremer-dictated deadline. I'm just hoping that a lot of the intra-Iraqi discussions and contacts that are going on now are about this extremely important topic.
But in the meantime there are many, extremely pressing issues of governance of the country that need to be attended to, and this should preferably happen at the hands of an empowered and legitimate Iraqi administration. That is the function that the yet-to-be-named "Transitional Government" is supposed to serve.
But if the convoluted and anti-democratic strictures of Bremer's TAL should continue to prevent the Iraqi parties from forming this administration, then who the heck is is in charge?
Under international law, it is still the occupying military that's in charge... Right through to the time of the conclusion of a final peace agreement between a legitimate Iraqi successor government and the governments of the occupying armies.
But with the "privilege" of running Iraq as a "foreign occupying power" comes an enormous amount of responsibility, too: responsibility for the wellbeing of all residents of the occupied territory (hah!) and responsibility to operate completely within the bounds of the Fourth Geneva Convention and the rest of the provisions of International Humanitarian Law that govern the conduct of "belligerent military occupations"...
So far, the US/UK occupiers have contravened IHL in numerous ways in their conduct of the occupation... Not least by seeking already through the TAL and through the CPA's many "Orders" and "Regulations", which still remain in force, to completely change the juridical and governance underpinnings of the country's administration in many, very serious ways. IHL completely forbids that.
Once there is an empowered and more-or-less legitimate (from the Iraqi citizenry's viewpoint) Transitional Government, the TAL says it should stick by all those earlier Bremer-dictated laws and regulations. But what standing does any of the TAL have under international law? As far as I can see, very little indeed.
Anyway, I hadn't meant to write much here. Mainly, I'll leave an open thread here for y'all to put links and discussion into.
Catching up with my reading here. I only just got down to this great post, "The Other Pope", in which Juan Cole pulled together many facts about the late Pope's political positions that were highly inconvenient to the US rightwingers who try to claim him as their own...
Including on Palestine, worker's rights, the death penalty, the Iraq invasion, etc etc.
Great work.
A combination of physiology and Real Life have taken over Helena's brain and ability to blog today. I was going to post an open thread so y'all could post comments about Iraq (like Yankeedoodle used to before he brought in Matt and friendly Fire as his excellent 'guest writers'.)
But then I moseyed (?sp) over to Riverbend's blog and just loved this post on Iraqis' new exposure to US Big Media:
The schedule on MBC’s Channel 4 goes something like this:
9 am – CBS Evening News
9:30 am – CBS The Early Show
10:45 am – The Days of Our Lives
11:20 am – Wheel of Fortune
11:45 am – Jeopardy
12:05 pm – A re-run of whatever was on the night before – 20/20, Inside Edition, etc.
And the programming continues…
I’ve been enchanted with the shows these last few weeks. The thing that strikes me most is the fact that the news is so… clean. It’s like hospital food. It’s all organized and disinfected. Everything is partitioned and you can feel how it has been doled out carefully with extreme attention to the portions- 2 minutes on women’s rights in Afghanistan, 1 minute on training troops in Iraq and 20 minutes on Terri Schiavo! All the reportages are upbeat and somewhat cheerful, and the anchor person manages to look properly concerned and completely uncaring all at once...
I’ve always sensed from the various websites that American mainstream news is far-removed from reality- I just didn’t know how far. Everything is so tame and simplified. Everyone is so sincere.
Furthermore, I don’t understand the worlds fascination with reality shows. Survivor, The Bachelor, Murder in Small Town X, Faking It, The Contender… it’s endless. Is life so boring that people need to watch the conjured up lives of others?
I have a suggestion of my own for a reality show. Take 15 Bush supporters and throw them in a house in the suburbs of, say, Falloojeh for at least 14 days. We could watch them cope with the water problems, the lack of electricity, the check points, the raids, the Iraqi National Guard, the bombings, and- oh yeah- the ‘insurgents’. We could watch their house bombed to the ground and their few belongings crushed under the weight of cement and brick or simply burned or riddled with bullets. We could see them try to rebuild their life with their bare hands (and the equivalent of $150)…
I’d not only watch *that* reality show, I’d tape every episode.
But still, that "chipper voice" saying "So you can watch what *they* watch" strikes me as the most insidious, scary part of the whole venture.
South African JWN commenter Dominic and I have both started working on trying to find a good--preferably primary-source-- articulation of the "Total Strategy" developed by the apartheid regime in 1976-77 with a view to being able to do a good comparative study between that and what is probably the Bush administration's authoritative articulation of the 'Global War on Terror', namely the National Security Strategy document of September 2002.
We're not quite there yet. Any other interested JWN readers are warmly invited to join our little project. Also, if you yourself are unable to contribute to this work but know of someone else who might be interested, please forward this post to them!
The quick background on the 'Total Strategy' is that in 1974-76 two disastrous sets of things happened to the "security situation" and the "security strategy" pursued up until then by the apartheid bosses:
This was seen as the "collapse of vital buffer states". Plus, of course, the example of victory provided by the nationalists in those two countries might--it was feared in Pretoria-- serve as inspiration to SA's own majority Black and other non-White populations... And
(2) In 1976, the sprawling, Black-only "townships" of Soweto incubated the Soweto Uprising, a revolt by disaffected Black youth that spread rapidly through most of the country's urban areas. The youth were rebelling against the perceived passivity of their own elders as much as against the continuation of White control. They sought to make the country "ungovernable", and were much more radical than most of the older-generation supporters of the existing nationalist organizations.
It does sound a lot like the Bush administration's GWOT already, doesn't it? I guess my aim is to flesh out this hypothesis as much as possible.
Dominic doesn't think this portion of Vol. 2 of the TRC report gives much useful info about the TS. However, I think it's not a bad place to start, especially paras 108-139 and 152-165.
Dominic has found a couple of really helpful (though still not primary) sources. One is a book that I think he picked off his bookshelf called “Brutal Force”: it was written by Gavin Cawthra and published by International Defence and Aid Fund (IDAF) in 1986.
The other is the web-available text of a research paper titled Modernizing Racism: Racial Confederalism and Racial Consociationalism”. It was written in 1999 by a UCLA grad student in sociology called Alan Emery...
Well, I just Googled Emery, and look at this: It's the text of a paper he gave to the SA Sociological Conference in 2003, titled Comparing Opposition to Apartheid and Emerging Opposition to American Empire: The Dynamics of Ideological, Military and Political Power.
Here's an excerpt from what Emery wrote there:
Emery does deal with that a little there in that 2003 paper-- and also in his 1999 paper. In his 2003 paper he writes of the late-apartheid leadership in SA that:
1. Eliminate the movement leadership;
2. Crush the oppositional organizations;
3. Impose your own vision of social organization.
Based on the logic of counter-revolution, the state attempted at this point to restructure oppositional civil society. Hence the considerable increase in the number of detentions in the years from 1985-1987.
In addition, in the footnotes to his 2003 paper, Emery cites a 1988 book called Selected official South African strategic perceptions, 1976-1987 -- and guess what, my local great university library here in Charlottesville, Virginia actually has it! I'm certainly hoping that someplace there I can find one or more documents analogous to Bush's 2002 Natinal Security Strategy... and then my little textual-analysis project can proceed.
Well, it would be a lot better if I could find an online text. But we'll see what we can do about that.
Meantime, here are some of the interesting things that Dominic noted from Gavin Cawthra's book Brutal Force:
Let me pick out some of the info on these pages.
P W Botha became Defence Minister in 1966. B J Vorster was Prime Minister, with an “outward” policy, otherwise called “détente”, for a “constellation of Southern African States” led by South Africa. In 1974 there was a coup in Portugal and Mozambique became independent in June 1975. In August 1975 South Africa invaded Angola but was beaten back. P W Botha outlined the “total strategy” in two Defence White Papers, one in 1975 and the other in 1977. Botha was rivalled by General van den Bergh, head of BOSS, but when Connie Mulder was involved in the “Information Scandal” P W Botha was able to push through and become Prime Minister in September 1978 (later President after the change in the constitution, and only succeeded by de Klerk in September 1989).
Gavin gets to the “National Security Doctrine” at the bottom of page 26, saying: “The basic premise of the SADF’s doctrine – that there is a ’communist total onslaught’ in all spheres aginst the security of the state – is a product of cold war thinking which gradually established itself in the minds of apartheid security planners during the 1950s and 1960s. … By the time Botha became Defence Minister he was well versed in these concepts. … The development of a ‘total response’ to this percieved ‘total onslaught’ took somewhat longer to materialise.”
The State Security Council was established in 1972. P W Botha, the thug, was identified with the verligtes (the more "emlightened" Afrikaners), believe it or not.
“It involves economy, ideology, technology, and even social matters and can therefore only be meaningful and valid if proper account is taken of these other spheres… all countries must, more than ever, muster all their activities – political, economic, diplomatic and military – for their defence. This, in fact, is the meaning of ‘Total Strategy’”. (1975 Defence White Paper).
Then Gavin mentions General Magnus Malan (as “the most prominent of the ‘Total Strategy’ advocates”) who was attached to the French forces in Algeria in the 1960s and studied at the US Army Command and General Staff College, and then:
“The French theorist André Beaufre features prominently in the more intellectual of the SADF training courses… According to Philip Frankel, who has conducted the most comprehensive study of the developmentof the SADF’s ‘Total Strategy’, vurtually every course at the Joint Defence College is based on one or other of Beaufre’s strategic works.”
So there are two more good leads, Beaufre and Frankel. It looks like Beaufre is the originator of the term “Total Strategy”.
The following is a quote from the 1977 Defence White Paper:
“The resolution of a conflict in the times in which we now live demands interdependent and co-ordinated action in all fields – military, psychological, economic, political, sociological, technological, diplomatic, ideological, cultural, etc. … It is therefore essential that a Total National Strategy be formulated at the highest level. The Defence of the Republic of South Africa is not solely the responsibility of the Department of Defence. On the contrary, the maintenance of the sovereignty of the RSA is the combined responsibility of all government departments. This can be taken further – it is the responsibility of the entire population and every population group.”
...
The next lead is Gavin’s mention of a symposium (its first) of the Institute of Strategic Studies of the University of Pretoria, starting “just two days after Botha signed the White Paper”, i.e. in 1977. This symposium heard Lt. Gen. J R Dutton.
There was another conference of military and business people in 1977 given by the National Management and Development Foundation attended and addressed by Malan, Ian Mackenzie, chairman of Standard Bank, and Maj. Gen. Neil Webster, SADF Director-General of Resources.
In 1979 Botha issued a Twelve Point Plan which is given on page 2 of the .pdf document at http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/groups/scr/emery.pdf under the heading “Modernizing Racism: Racial Confederalism and Racial Consociationalism”. Worth looking at. Note points 11 and 12.
In 1980 “… rearrangement of government and state functions served to both facilitate and disguise the establishment of a centralised and a largely secret power structure dominated by military, police and intelligence personnel and known as the National Security Management System.”
Another conference was held at the Carlton Centre in Johannesburg in 1981 attended by 300 leading businessmen and the entire cabinet where one government official declared that ‘the National Party used to regard private enterprise as part of the onslaught, but under P W Botha, it is part of the strategy’. Business-backed organisations such as the Urban Foundation played a prominent role in the effort to ‘stabilise’ the black urban areas in the wake of the 1976 uprisings, says Gavin. The successor organisations of the Urban Foundation are still around and active.
This period might be of interest to Jonathan Edelstein. Consociationalism plus ‘free enterprise’ was all the rage and the tricameral parliament was the vehicle. My brother-in-law was picked up and tortured during the boycott campaign against the tricameral parliament. Consociationalism was part of the ‘Total Strategy’ and I would say it is part of the Bush equivalent, too, as applied in Iraq and other parts of the imperial periphery.
Gavin then goes on to describe the structure of the National Security Management System. Top is the State Security Council (SSC), then 15 Interdepartmental Committees (IDCs), covering all departments of state, with an SADF representative reporting to the SSC Secretariat sitting on each IDC. Then the ten Joint Management Committees corresponding to the area commands of the SADF covering the whole country, and comprised of the SADF regional commander and senior officials from government departments. Under the JMC are sub-JMCs in smaller towns. All these structure operated in secret. The SADF ran 5-month ‘inter-agency’ course at its Defence College on implementation of the ‘Total Strategy’. It would be nice to see the course material...
I think my next steps will be to print out and give a good thorough read to all of Alan Emery's 2003 paper; maybe try to contact Alan; get ahold of that "strategic perceptions" book from UVA library; see what else might be available...
If anyone else has chance to give Alan's 2003 paper a good read and can write a good quick digest of it, please do so and post that on the Comments board here. (Length restrictions lifted for such good work.)
Now, I gotta run. Tomorrow, no doubt, back to Iraq news. Today it's exactly nine weeks since the election, and they still don't have a government.
And no, naming a "speaker" for their Assembly may be a step in the right direction but it is still nowhere near the same as naming an empowered, legitimate, national government.
I'm in Maryland. My laptop doesn't work. I'm just borrowing a friend's computer to check email and write this.
It felt very frustrating, then I remembered most folks in the world don't organize their lives according to "instant access", cyber-time. And their mental health and general effectiveness in running their lives is probably far superior to those of folks who're foreever rushing around to catch the "latest" of the latest news.
Ommmm.
Actually, today and tomorrow I'm doing Quaker things. So perhaps some cyber-silence is very appropriate.
Back Sunday evening, or Monday. If way opens.
Last night, we went to an amazing production-- directed by my very good friend Betsy Rudelich Tucker-- of "Far Away", a play written in 2000 by the brilliant British playwright Caryl Churchill.
I don't have time here to write much about it. If any of you gets a chance to see it-- rush to the theater in question! To think that Churchill wrote it before 9/11 is truly amazing. The woman can see into the future!
The future she sees into, and portrays in around 70 mins of very sparse performance time, is one in which two human tendencies-- the desire to paper over or ignore disturbing signs of violence and violation, and the desire to be extremely judgmental about others-- rapidly degerate into what can only be described as a form of dementia.
In the last scene, the entirely believable and fairly sympathetic three characters in the play are earnestly talking to each other about whether "the cats have come down on the side of the Frendch", or "the Chinese, the porcupines, and the gazelles have lined with the Germans and the children under five"... And even whether "the river is for us or against us this week".
Before that scene there is a lengthy, completely silent scene that consists only of a slow parade of individuals, one by one, across the stage. When each reaches a box in the middle of it, s/he stands and holds his hands out and then is "executed" with a flash of light.
After the performance, Betsy talked about it a little. She said that Churchill's own directions for this scene had been very sparse: that there should be a slow parade of "raggedly dressed individuals wearing fantastic hats" across the stage, where each one in turn should be executed. (The hats, and the making of them, were part of an earlier scene.)
Betsy said that Churchill gave no precise number for the number of those doing this, except to write that ten was too few, and it could be 20 or 100 or more... Betsy had 34 of them, but it went so slowly that it took up maybe 25 minutes of the entire performance.
The way Betsy and her costume designer staged this, though, felt like a blow to my solar plexus. I felt literally sick to my stomach. She had each of the condemned persons dressed in ragged canvas pants and dragging a shackle from one foot. The very "fantastic" hats were perched atop a plain black hood that covered the whole face. Then beneath that each prisoner wore a ragged but clearly rectilinear poncho whose shape was clearly revealed as, just before the execution, he held his hands out to the side... Standing on a box...
Not "far away" at all.
Before last year's election, things were getting so bad in Iraq that the Bush administration was forced to commission two additional studies of "what went wrong?" The higher-level of these studies was the one the Prez commissioned "personally"-- the one headed by former Virginia Senator Chuck Robb and legal eagle Larry Silberman.
That one looked into "why the US intel agencies had gotten it so wrong on so many of the 'claims' the administration had made about Saddam Hussein's WMDs, etc, in the lead-up to the war. " (Wrong question. It wasn't mainly the work of the intel agencies that was faulty-- though certainly, numerous mistakes were made. But it was overwhelmingly the fault of the political leaders who created a clear climate in which the intel chiefs were encouraged to bring in completely skewed intelligence... But the commission wasn't "allowe" to look into that.)
The other, lower-level and more technical report was one produced by the quasi-nongovernmental Rand Corporation, which looked into the failures of planning for the post-war period in Iraq.
I've quickly skimmed the news reports about the Robb-Silberman report, and I think that today's NYT editorial got it pretty right in its scathing critique of the report this morning:
We were not optimistic when President Bush was pressured into creating this panel in February 2004. Though bipartisan, its membership lacked stature or independence, and Mr. Bush failed to give the commission a sweeping mandate that would go beyond rehashing the distressing but well-known shortcomings of the intelligence agencies. Still, it seemed worth waiting until after the election for the results because it was hard to imagine that the panel would not ask the vital questions.
Sadly, there is nothing about the central issue - how the Bush administration handled the intelligence reports on Iraq's weapons programs and presented them to the public to win support for the invasion of Iraq. All we get is an excuse: the panel was "not authorized" to look at this question, so it didn't bother. The report says the panel "interviewed a host of current and former policy makers" about the intelligence on Iraq, but did not "review how policy makers subsequently used that information." (We can just see it - an investigator holding up his hand and declaiming: "Stop right there, Mr. Secretary! We're not authorized to know what you did.")
Just compare this job with the work of the 9/11 commission, whose chairman, Thomas Kean, battled the White House over access to documents, fearlessly expanded the inquiry and insisted that policy makers testify in public - and not just about the shortcomings of their subordinates.
The report is right in saying that American claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs were "dead wrong" because the intelligence was old or from highly dubious sources, and because the analysis was driven by a predetermined conclusion that Mr. Hussein was a threat. But we knew that.
The panel said timidly that "it is hard to deny the conclusion that intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom." But it utterly ignored the way President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his team, and Condoleezza Rice, as national security adviser, created that environment by deciding what the facts were and saying so, repeatedly.
It does not say that these powerful people knew or should have known that there was no new intelligence on Iraq, and that as the intelligence reports were sanitized for the public, the caveats were stripped out. Instead, it loyally maintains the fiction that Mr. Bush was just given bum information by incompetent intelligence agents.
The way the administration hyped the intelligence on Iraq is not just a matter of intellectual curiosity. It is vital that the public know the answers because Americans are now being asked to accept a new set of claims about nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea. A full airing of this issue could help John Negroponte, after his expected confirmation as national intelligence director, ensure that the missteps and misrepresentations are not repeated as the nation grapples with real threats from those and other countries, not imagined threats from Iraq.
As it stands, the report has mainly negative value. It reminds us that the Senate Intelligence Committee has yet to complete and publish its investigation of the handling of the Iraq intelligence. And it shows us what the 9/11 panel's report might have looked like if Mr. Bush had succeeded in making Henry Kissinger chairman.
Of course, with the Republicans having increased their hold on the Senate in the November elections, I don't think we should hold our breaths waiting for the Senate Intel Committee's report to come out with a fearless exposé of the intel-handling issue, either.
