January 31, 2008

Al-Ahram Weekly on Egypt and Gaza

I've been unbelievably busy with the galley-proofs (or whatever they call today's functional equivalent of them) of my book. Five chapters down, and two to finish tomorrow... Meanwhile, I see that today's issue of Al-Ahram Weekly (in English) has as expected a number of informative articles on the thorny Gaza-Egypt question.

This is probably the best general wrap-up of the tricky Egyptian-Palestinian dilemma over Gaza. It includes this:

    "The Israelis and Americans can say all they want. But they know that Egypt has to act upon its interests," commented an Egyptian official who asked for anonymity. And, he explained, it is certainly not in the interest of Egypt to ignore the fact that if the Rafah crossing point was to be completely sealed off again under continued Israeli siege on Gaza another breach will occur. "It will be a matter of time before the Palestinians break into Rafah again. This is a scenario we dread so much. We would rather work to secure a prompt and internationally accepted mechanism for the operation of the Rafah crossing point," the official added.

    For Egypt to secure a prompt and legal operation of the borders it would need to either secure the consent of Hamas for the re-instatement of the borders agreement suspended by the Hamas control of Gaza or alternatively to introduce a new agreement acceptable to both sides and passable by Israel and the international community. Either scenarios, however, would require a Hamas-Fatah agreement, if not full reconciliation.

    "I call upon all the Palestinian people, with all their factions, to prioritise the need to end the suffering of the Palestinian people," President Hosni Mubarak said earlier this week before calling for a Hamas-Fatah reconciliation to be hosted by Cairo.

    Mubarak's call for Palestinian reconciliation is not exactly new. Egypt has tried, on and off, during the past few months to mend the many cracks in the Palestinian rank -- but with no success at all.

    Mubarak's call for Palestinian reconciliation this time, however, carries a new firmness. "Before, Egypt wanted to mend the Palestinian differences to secure Palestinian unity at time of Palestinian-Israeli negotiations. Now, it is much more than that. Egypt wants to make sure that Palestinian affairs and differences will be contained within the Palestinian territories and will not spill over to neighbouring Egyptian territories as we have seen during the past week," the Egyptian official commented.

    Mubarak's call for Palestinian unity was met with overt and covert criticism from American and Israeli officials who make no secrete of their wish to isolate and eventually ostracise Hamas. It was, however, supported firmly by the Arab League and mildly by the Europeans.

    For their part, Hamas officials were quick to make a vocal and repeated welcome of Mubarak's call for Palestinian dialogue. It was Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas who declined the Egyptian initiative, almost in a rough way...

Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:07 PM | Comments (2)

Kenya: Life, death, and unknowing when things fall apart

If you want to know what actually happens in communities that get caught up in a paroxysm of inter-group violence, and what it feels like to live in such a community, go over to the Kenyan Peacework blog today and read this post from Dave Zarembka, a US Quaker who lives with his Kenyan Quaker wife Gladys in Kipkarren River, in western Kenya.

All of Dave's emails about the violence that has swept Kenya since the deeply contested January 27 election have been posted on the KP blog (which I earlier wrote about here), and are worth reading. In this one he writes, in particular, about the role played in fomenting the climate of violence-- and the commission of actual acts of horrendous violence-- by the rapid spreading of fear-inducing rumors and the parallel spreading of great clouds of unknowing.

He gives several examples of this, and reports several things that have been happening in his town in the past couple of days. Including this:

    In Chekalini, the area where Florence lives, the high school is now the internally displaced person's camp for about 1000 Luhya who have fled the violence in Nakuru and Naivasha. Like the Kikuyu IDP's here, they have lost everything. More are coming all the time as they are being forced out of Central Province as being non-Kikuyu. So soon we are having another humanitarian disaster. A man stopped me on the road during my morning walk through town and said that it was not fair that the Kikuyu were getting relief and the others were not. At that time I did not understand since I did not know that so many internal refugees had showed up in Lugari. Lugari is the closest Luhya District on the main road through Eldoret so I suspect that many of these people will stop here.

    None of this, of course, is reported by the media since no one has reporters of any kind in the area. Are those who have died in Lugari District accounted for in the national total which
    is now officially 850? I doubt that many of them are. There are hundreds and hundreds of little places like Lumakanda, Turbo, and Kipkarren River. What is the real truth of what is happening in all these communities?

He ends with this:
    So truth, the reality of what actually is happening around you is difficult to grasp because all those normal markers you have about your surroundings are suspect. It is so easy to be "sucked in" by rumors. And yet to understand the dangers around you, you have to listen to others.
Dave is an incredibly fearless guy and a valuable witness for us all there. He reports that another US Quaker, Eden Grace, has been evacuated from Kisumu to Nairobi with her family, but he himself seems thus far intent on staying where he is.

Send Dave and Gladys a thought or a prayer. Read (and perhaps send your comments to) that blog post there at KP. Circulate that post or other KP posts to all your friends who might be interested. And do whatever you can, wherever you are, to urge your government to work with Kenya's people to restore calm, security, and hope to a country now bleeding badly from this internal violence.

Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:26 AM | Comments (1)

January 30, 2008

Winograd: a nonsense report?

I am trying to imagine the physiological distortions the members of the Winograd wound themselves up into when they issued this crazed judgment on the decisionmaking in the last days of the 33-day war, and have been unable to:

    Winograd assailed the final, large-scale ground operation launched in the final 60 hours of the war in which dozens of IDF soldiers were killed, saying it "did not achieve any military objectives nor did it fulfill its potential."

    "The ground operation did not reduce the Katyusha fire nor did it achieve significant accomplishments, and its role in accelerating or improving the political settlement is unclear," said Winograd. "Also unclear is how it affected the Lebanese government and Hezbollah regarding the cease-fire."

    "The manner in which the ground operation was conducted raises the most difficult of questions," he continued.

    However, the panel found that the decisions that motivated the political echelons to approve the offensive were acceptable.

This is a nonsense conclusion.

That last ground assault on Lebanon not only did not realize any objectives on the ground-- it also was launched after the terms of the final ceasefire had been agreed by Israel on August 11, so it did not affect the terms of the ceasefire. In addition, because it was such a tactical fiasco, it ended up delivering far from the intended final, "uber-deterrent" message. Instead it showed that the ground forces' readiness and planning were garbage. Remember all those news pictures of the exhausted, ill-equipped, and defeated Israeli ground force troops staggering back south across the border on August 14 and 15? And it had led to those 33 quite avoidable deaths of Israeli soldiers.

Until recently, Israel has had a fairly solid reputation among the western democracies for, at least, being able to establish serious national commissions charged with investigating past mistakes. For all its shortcomings, the Kahan Commission into the the Sabra and Shatila massacres was one such body.

Now, with the recent final findings of the Or Commission into the October 2000 killings by the police of 10 or 11 Palestinian Israelis, and this latest report form the Winograd Commission, we see that even this once strong feature of Israel's governance system has become badly degraded.

In US military and political circles, people like to talk about the importance of doing "lessons learned" exercises. In Britain, more realistically, they tend to call them "lessons identified"-- since learning is yet another stage, that requires some active intelligence going in.

But in the Israel of the Winograd Commission, they don't even want to identify the lessons to be learned from the past? Interesting, indeed.

Posted by Helena Cobban at 08:34 PM | Comments (7)

Ahmedinejad continues hateful anti-Israel tirades

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad today announced that the days of Israel, which he calls the "filthy Zionist entity", are numbered and the said "entity" will fall soon or later.

AFP reports this:

    "I advise you to abandon the filthy Zionist entity which has reached the end of the line," Ahmadinejad told world powers in a speech in the southern city of Bushehr carried live on the state television.

    "It has lost its reason to be and will sooner or later fall," he said. "The ones who still support the criminal Zionists should know that the occupiers' days are numbered."

I abhor such hate speech. Even if Iran's president and many of its people are strongly opposed to the policies of the Israeli government, then describing the whole state of Israel (and by extension, its citizens) as "filthy" is a quite unacceptable and degrading way to refer to them.

Referring to Israel as "the Zionist entity" rather than the name it has as a recognized public entity in the international arena is also abhorrent.

Isn't it also the case that that, at a time when Iran's negotiators are dealing with the latest round of Security Council diplomacy concerned with their nuclear program, and when Iran clearly seems eager to build warmer relations with states like Egypt, which has a longstanding peace agreement with Israel-- then to have the country's president spouting off such abhorrent hate speech must be quite unhelpful to such efforts?

I've been very interested, over the years, to study the relationships among what the Arabs call the "Jabhat al-Mumana'a"-- the "blocking front" of regional states and parties dedicated to blocking the implementation of Israeli-US hegemonist plans for the region. The main members of this front are Iran, Syria, Lebanon's Hizbullah, and Palestine's Hamas.

We should note that none of the other members of the JM refer to Israel in the same demeaning, hateful way that A-N does. First of all, the leaders of all the other JM members refer overwhelmingly to "Israel", not to the "Zionist entity". Secondly, they don't use hateful descriptors like "filthy" when referring to it. Thirdly, they show varying degrees of readiness to deal with Israel as an established fact in the region.

For example, Syria participated in a lengthy, and actually remarkably productive process of face-to-face peace negotiations with Israel from 1991 through 2000. President Bashar al-Asad, like his father before him (since 1973 or so), has always stood ready to negotiate a final peace agreement with Israel. Syria sent a representative to the regional peace talks held in Annapolis, Maryland, last November.

Hizbullah has battled Israel's armies mightily, mainly on the land of its own native Lebanon. But it has also, from 1996 on, shown itself ready to participate in indirect ceasefire negotiations with Israel and then-- with one notable exception, in July 2006-- to abide by the ceasefires thereby agreed. (And Israel has been a frequent violator of those ceasefires.)

Regarding Israel's longterm stature as a mainly-Jewish state in the region, Hizbullah's leaders have repeatedly abstained from pronouncing on that, saying that that is a matter for the Palestinian people, not the Lebanese people, to decide.

As for Hamas, its leaders talk frequently and easily about "Israel." They certainly accept-- and are sometimes eager for-- the idea of limited cooperation on ceasefires and other matters, though with the general proviso that these be negotiated through third parties, not directly. Regarding Israel's longterm stature in the region, Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal repeated to me just two weeks ago the organization's readiness to conclude a hudna of undefined length with an Israel that had withdrawn from all the Palestinian lands occupied in 1967 and had satisfied all the Palestinians' rights including the right to return.

Hamas's position is quite evidently different from that of, for example, PA president Mahmoud Abbas. Different, too, from the kinds of peace settlement envisaged by the vast majority of that fast-fading breed, the Israeli peaceniks, at this time. But it is also notably different from the hateful, almost specifically genocidal position articulated by Ahmadinejad.

I can't imagine why Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei allows A-N to carry on like this.

Maybe the subtle ploy there is to make the other members of the Jabhat al-Mumana'a look moderate by comparison?

Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:04 AM | Comments (67)

Meshaal interview at 'Foreign Policy' website

A condensed version of my Jan. 16th interview with Hamas head Khaled Meshaal is now published on the website of Foreign Policy magazine. Under my agreement with them, they have that as an exclusive for two weeks, and I'll be publishing the (much longer) full version of the interview on Feb. 13th.

It was a real pleasure working with the folks there. From me saying they could have it, to them doing the editing work, etc., and getting it published took somewhere less than six hours. Plus, I think they did a good edit.

Posted by Helena Cobban at 08:21 AM | Comments (0)

January 29, 2008

Waiting for Winograd...

Y-net News tells us that today, one day before the long-delayed release of the Winograd Commission's second report, Ehud Olmert spoke in the Knesset about "the loneliness of the leader."

He did so, as part of the Knesset's special commemoration of the centenary of the birth of renowned Zionist terror leader Yair Stern, the eponymous leader of the Stern Gang. Go read the thoughts of the besieged Olmert on that man. Also, look at the very suggestive picture of the lonely Olmert that they have on the page there.

And talking of lonely leaders, Akiva Eldar has a fascinating little vignette in today's HaAretz, about Mahmoud Abbas's recent meeting with a clutch of Kadima politicians.

Eldar writes,

    They met an exhausted, even somewhat extinguished politician who has lost half his kingdom and is clinging to the other half. Before answering any question about the diplomatic negotiations, Abbas squinted at Ahmed Qurei (Abu Ala), who heads the negotiating teams along with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. His eyes sought out Qurei after every answer, as though expecting confirmation. One of the guests discerned a trace of scorn on Qurei's lips.
Honestly, I do find Abu Mazen's current position very tragic. I still believe he is basically a good man who wants the best for his people. But he is in this political-leadership game way over his head, and as the nominal leader of an extremely corrupt and dysfunctional political movement that is beyond his ability to control very much of it at all.

Having to keep Abu Ala' around in the Muqata really can't help. The two of them were keen competitors for the mantle left by Arafat's death. They were keen competitors even while the Old Man was still alive.

That "scorn" that Eldar writes about on Abu Ala's lips reminds me of the way that, when I had lunch with Arafat in the Muqata in early 2004, the two long-time Arafat courtiers Saeb Erakat and Yasser Abed Rabboo were almost openly mocking their boss. They were talking over him and treating him like a dotty old buffoon. (Which he may have been by that point. But it was very unseemly to see the way those two men treated the Palestinians' national leader.)

More of Eldar's description of Abbas's recent meeting with the Kadima pols:

    Abbas said he believes the prime minister truly aspires to reach a permanent status agreement and that if this does not happen, someone else will be sitting in the Muqata at the end of this year - maybe someone from the Hamas command, maybe someone from the Central Command.
That latter reference is fascinating! It is to the IDF's Central Command. In other words, Abbas was saying that if this year's US-led diplomacy doesn't work, either Hamas will take over the West Bank completely or the whole rickety structure of the "Palestinian Authority" (PA) itself will collapse, and the IDF will have to come in and pick up the pieces itself...

Eldar wrote that long-time Labour Party bully-boy and Infrastructure Minister Benjamin ("Fuad") Ben-Eliezer already thinks that Abbas is useless, and has for some time now been pushing the government to release imprisoned Fateh leader Marwan Barghouthi, so he can become the interlocutor instead. He wrote that Ben-Eliezer had told Olmert that:

    he believes Barghouti is the only one who has a chance of getting the Hamas genie back into the bottle and restoring Gaza to the PA. Olmert responded, "This isn't the time."
(Intriguingly, Eldar also writes that Olmert also gave, more or less, that same response to Fayyad's plan to put control of the crossing points between Gaza and Israel into PA hands. Really?)

And a final point of considerable interest in Eldar's piece:

    The breach of the walls along the Gaza-Egypt border and the incidents at the border crossings around Jerusalem made the Israel Defense Forces and the Shin Bet security service think about their nightmare: tens of thousands of Palestinians, with or without Israeli peace activists, embarking on a quiet march toward the capital. In February 2002, Haaretz reported that when Tanzim activist Raad al-Karmi was executed - putting an end to one of the longest cease-fires since the start of the intifada - Yasser Arafat was closer than ever to deciding to forgo the armed intifada in favor of non-violent civil revolt.

    According to information obtained by Israel security sources, Arafat was talking about a march on Jerusalem. The IDF contemplated a scenario of thousands of unarmed Palestinian civilians marching from Ramallah, Jericho and Bethlehem toward the barriers that surround Jerusalem, waving peace placards at television cameras from around the world. They wondered what an officer should do when his soldiers are stuck amid hundreds of Palestinian women and children carrying posters and making their way toward a Jewish settlement. And what should they do when processions set out from all West Bank towns, toward the Jewish settlements that surround them?

Yes, what indeed...

Posted by Helena Cobban at 03:37 PM | Comments (1)

January 28, 2008

"No way to avoid Hamas now", in CSM

My column under that title is in Wednesday's CSM. (Also, archived here.*)

The bottom line is here:

    During Mr. Bush's recent trip to the Middle East, he said some welcome things about his desire for regional peace. But no one can build such a peace while continuing to exclude (and energetically combat) a large, well-rooted political movement such as Hamas.

    Washington needs to find a way to talk to the leaders of the movement. Longtime friends in Egypt can help establish a channel. The war-shattered peoples of Gaza and of southern Israel need Washington to help, not hinder, the reaching of a cease-fire.

Anyway, go read the whole thing...

* Also, excerpted by Al-Jazeera, in Arabic, here. (Hat-tip Ahmed.)

Posted by Helena Cobban at 09:07 PM | Comments (0)

Hamas transforms the regional map

More evidence is emerging that, in undertaking January 23's mass civilian bust-out from Gaza, Gaza's elected Hamas leadership was seeking not only to deal with the immediate humanitarian crisis brought on by Israel's tough siege of Gaza but also to throw down a sharp political challenge to the US-Israeli plans for the region.

Up to January 23, those plans rested strongly on maintaining Fateh's Mahmoud Abbas as the sole leader, decisionmaker, and representative for the Palestinian people. They dealt with the "inconvenient" facts of the legitimacy Hamas had gained from its victory in the 2006 elections, and its continuing popularity among large segments of the Palestinians, by waging harsh efforts to exclude Hamas from any decisionmaking role while also trying to turn the Palestinian population against it by means of the intentional collective punishment inflicted on the people of Gaza.

Now, with the bust-out, Hamas has turned the tables, and it is Abbas himself who looks besieged. At least, he looks so at the political level-- though he and his followers continue to get hefty economic handouts from the US and other western powers.

Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal is now on an official visit to Saudi Arabia, discussing the Kingdom's plans to patch up Hamas-Fateh relations. It was just last February that the Saudis concluded the "Mecca Agreement" between the two sides, which led to the formation of National Unity Government. The Bush administration and its network of handsomely compensated "allies" in Fateh were very unhappy with that arrangement, and they worked hard to undermine it. In June it did fall apart, when Hamas took what Khaled Meshaal described to me as a pre-emptive, defensive action to prevent US-backed Fateh operative Muhammad Dahlan from launching an anti-Hamas coup in Gaza. (There was, in truth, plenty of blame to go all around.)

We can imagine that Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, who had invested considerable national and personal prestige in brokering the Mecca Agreement was not happy with the way it fell apart-- or with those actions from both sides that hastening its unraveling. But now, Meshaal is the one in Riyadh, while Abbas remains shuttling between Ramullah and West Jerusalem, where he sits looking sad and uncomfortable in his meetings with Ehud Olmert, who is also sitting on his own political knife-edge at home this week.

Meshaal is expected to proceed from Riyadh to Cairo, where President Mubarak has invited both him and Abbas for talks aimed at (a) inter-Palestinian reconciliation and (b) reaching an Egyptian-Palestinian agreement to regulate the Gaza Egypt border. Meshaa accepted all parts oif Mubarak's invitation. Abbas has turned down the invitation to meet with Meshaal in Cairo, though he said he might go to Cairo and hold his own parallel talks there with the Egyptians.

The immediate issue is what the regime will be for controlling the Gaza-Egypt border going forward. Hamas leaders have been frank for the past two years that their aim is to wrest Gaza out of the economic thralldom that Israel has maintained over it-- and the occupied West Bank-- since 1967. The latest manifestation of that thralldom was the Paris Agreement of 1994, which was an offshoot of the 1993 Oslo Agreement. Under Paris, the whole economy and society of Gaza and the West Bank were folded into a single "customs envelope" with Israel that got controlled by-- guess who!-- Israel. Thus, Israel explicitly retained the right to control all movement and goods and persons in and out of the two occupied territories.

Paris was supposed to apply only during the five-year "transitional period" that would follow Oslo, pending the conclusion and implementation of a final peace agreement between Israel and the PA. But guess what, that final peace agreement never got negotiated, so here we are 15 years after Oslo and there is still a "transition"....

It was the Paris Agreement, concluded between Israel and the PA, that enabled Israel to progressively tighten the screws of the siege it has maintained on Gaza in recent years. It has been Paris that has allowed Israel to maintain tight control over the movement of goods and persons not just into and out of the occupied West Bank, but also within the West Bank itself, thereby stifling the hopes for real economic development-- or even a normal life-- for the West Bank's residents. Small wonder that the Hamas people have wanted to do whatever they can to take either (or both) of the occupied territories out of the Paris Agreement. Neither Hamas nor Egypt was a party to the Paris Agreement...

It remains to be seen whether Hamas can somehow succeed in its long-articulated goal of bringing about a stable escape from the thralldom of Paris and reconnecting Gaza's 1.5 million residents to the world economy through Egypt, instead.

Its attempt to do this poses, as noted above, a sharp political challenge to Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak. Mubarak is sitting on his own potential political volcano at home, given that: (a) he is getting old, and the question of political succession in Egypt's ossified, one-party-dominated political system is a huge one; (b) the best-organized political movement in Egypt is the Muslim Brotherhood, which is also the mother-organization for Palestine's Hamas; and (c) popular sentiment in Egypt is extremely hostile to the pro-western stance Mubarak has maintained throughout his political life, and extremely sympathetic to the Palestinians in general, and Hamas in particular.

Hence, the decision Mubarak's security people evidently made back on Wednesday and Thursday that they could not re-seal the border with Gaza by brute force.

Since then, Egyptian officials have tried to cast their repeated decisions to continue keeping the border somewhat open in purely humanitarian terms, though it very evidently has strong political underpinnings, too. As we can see from Mubarak's decision to invite Meshaal, as well as Fateh, to visit Cairo for talks.

Meshaal is not the only regional actor now eager to make a splash in Cairo. Hamas's longtime allies in Iran now say they are close to restoring diplomatic relations that have been broken since, I think, late 1980. (That was the year when Egyptian Islamist Khaled Islambouli assassinated Egypt's previous pro-western president, Anwar al-Sadat. The new revolutionary regime in Iran immediately started glorifying Islambouli, including naming a street after him in Tehran. That has been a sticking point in relations ever since... )

I see that the Iranian official news agency is also describing the currently accelerating Cairo-Tehran contacts in largely "humanitarian" terms. I am not fooled.

Over the days ahead, the diplomacy around the Gaza-Egypt issue will be significant and very intense. And these days will also, in Israel, be seeing the long-delayed publication of the Winograd report. So it'll be an interesting week.

As of now, it looks as if the two clear losers of the currtent swirl of events are (a) Mahmoud Abbas, and (b) the Bush administration's ability to sustain its agenda in the region. The only clear winner, for now, is Hamas-- though we cannot know the extent of its "victory" yet; and there will almost certainly be further surprises ahead, for everyone.

The outcomes for all the other actors involved-- Mubarak, the Saudis, Olmert, Israel's further-right parties, the Iranians-- remain in play. Interesting days ahead.

Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:40 AM | Comments (6)

January 27, 2008

Very important: Quaker peacebuilding, Kenya

Readers may or may not be aware that the largest body of Quakers anywhere in the world is in Kenya. I have thought and prayed a lot for them during the very damaging inter-group violence that has plagued their country since the highly contentious (and most likely, illegally "stolen") election of last December 27.

What can members of a religious group that is deeply committed to nonviolence (pacifism) do when their home communities become caught up in a self-cycling paroxysm of violence, hatred, and fear?

Two or three days ago, a Quaker from Massachusetts called Mary Gilbert started sending me a large amount of information from the Friends (Quakers) in Kenya, about what they were trying to do there. Mary wanted me to post this on JWN. But it was so much information that I encouraged her to start a new, special blog to follow this situation. Never having blogged before, she had some initial trepidation to overcome. But now, in record time and with great courage and skill she has done it. Great work, Mary!

I am delighted to recommend to you all the new blog: Kenyan Peacework.

I'm imagining that Mary will be keeping it updated with further bulletins from Quakers working in Kenya, as they come in. Looking at it today, I was delighted to learn that the Kenyan Quakers have been holding a conference over these past three days (January 25-27) to pray on, discern, and coordinate their ongoing reactions to the crisis. Read the Jan. 26 report from that conference here.

I've been particularly interested in reading the reports sent out by David Zarembka. Dave is a long-time Quaker whom I know fairly well. Though he grew up in the US, his wife Gladys is Kenyan, and he has worked in Kenya and nearby countries a lot over the years. Last year, he and Gladys moved (back) to Kenya to live full-time there. He is an astute observer of the situation.

In this January 21 report he wrote:

    There is no political settlement in sight. One newspaper columnist stated today in the Daily Nation that the longer that things drag out the better it is for the Kibaki side: so, they have little incentive to genuinely engage in mediation. On the Raila side this means that time is against them so they might turn to drastic measures.

    Although there were no demonstrations over the weekend, the violence did not subside. Once the genie of violence gets out of the bottle, it is very hard to put it back in...

    To summarize, the election results were the spark for the violence. The tinder was all the alienated youth in Kenyan society. As time goes on the ethnic dimension will increase and attacks will lead to counter-attacks. As attacks become successful in forcing people to leave the Rift Valley, the violence becomes self-reinforcing leading to more attacks. At this point we must be thankful that the attackers have only traditional weapons--clubs, bows and arrows, machettes, and spears. If they had guns (which, if the violence continues, they will soon acquire in one way or another) the the death toll would soar and soar. Even now I am not sure that a political settlement will end the violence in the countryside, although it would give the security forces a greater chance to deal with it...

Dave's Jan. 13 analysis of the way much of the western MSM has been misreporting the crisis is also well worth reading. It includes this:
    Here is a January 7 story from Agence France Presse, titled "Police cheer as Kenya's witch-wary looters return war spoils."
    "Dozens of looters who profited from Kenya's post-election unrest began returning or dumping their ill-gotten gains around the port city of Mombasa Monday, frightened of cursed goods, police said.

    Television footage showed fearful, if not shameful, looters and their accomplices returning beds, sofa sets and other items after rumours that victims had deployed witch doctors to punish the thieves."

    The Kenyan papers had other explanations for the return of the goods. First, the government had declared an amnesty period of two days during which anyone who returned looted goods would not be prosecuted. This was reinforced by the Imams who preached in their mosques that people should return stolen goods. The fact that this peacemaking effort by the Moslems also contradicts the violent jihadists stereotype that Moslems are not peacemakers is perhaps why this was omitted from the "witchcraft report." Christian preachers also advised the return of stolen goods. The Kenyan reports had no mention of the alleged witchcraft...

So please go on over to the Kenyan Peacework blog if you want to gain some unbiased, direct, on-the-ground information about what is happening in Kenya, and also to find out what those dedicated peace-builders, the Kenyan Quakers, and their allies there are doing.

I am sure that their work would benefit a lot from more funding! If you're able to make a donation, the "African Great Lakes Initiative (AGLI)", which Dave Z. has been working with for many years now, has this web-page through which you can make secure online donations. It also has mailing info for where to send a US check.

One of KP's posts-- this one-- has information about another emergency fund established by friends of the Quaker projects in Kakamega, in western Kenya. I am not as familiar with the organization described there as I am with AGLI, but I am sure they do a great job, too.

Give what you can-- of money, of loving concern, and of prayers.

And again, a big thanks to Mary Gilbert for her fabulous work there.

Posted by Helena Cobban at 12:09 PM | Comments (1)

January 26, 2008

(Mis-)framing the Gaza-Israel conflict

In western countries and in much of the west-dominated "international community" news reports, commentaries, and statements by diplomats tend to present the Gaza-Israel conflict as some kind of two-sided issue in which on the one hand you have the siege (collective punishment) that Israel has been maintaining against the people of Gaza and on the other, the use by militant factions in Gaza-- now including Hamas-- of Qassam rockets against Israel.

And that's all that gets mentioned.

Israel and its allies like to keep the emphasis on the Qassam rockets and the casualties and disruption they have inflicted on southern Israel. Some liberal organizations in the west put more emphasis on the illegal collective punishment aspects of the Israeli siege of Gaza-- though they are nearly all careful to also criticize the Palestinians' firing of the Qassam rockets. The impression often left is that these two kinds of infraction are more or less commensurable, and that if only the Palestinians would give up firing their rockets then Israel would be able to ease up on the siege... End of story.

What gets left out of this account of what's happening are two important other dimensions:

    1. The military operations that Israel, for its part, has sustained at a high level against targets in Gaza throughout the past two years. These operations have been very destructive of life, limb, and vital civilian infrastructure. They have included numerous, quite deliberate extra-judicial executions-- a tactic that is quite illegal under all forms of law (hence "extra-judicial.") They have included the use of disproportionate violence, and violence that has often failed to take the necessary steps to discriminate between military and non-military targets.

    All these breaches of international humanitarian law can be classified as war crimes. And the casualties have been high. According to pages 6-7 of the 2007 Annual Report of the Israeli rights organization B'tselem (PDF here), in the two years 2006-2007 no fewer than 379 of the 816 Gaza Palestinians killed by the Israeli security forces were not engaged in hostilities at the time, and of a further 37 it could not be determined whether they were or were not participating in hostilities.

    On this page of B'tselem's website we can learn, meanwhile, that between June '04 and July '06, fourteen civilians in Israel were killed by the Qassams. (B'tselem judges that the Qassams themselves constitute an "illegal weapon", because of their lack of targetability. I am not sure about that.)

    This detailed listing in Wikipedia tells us today that four people in Israel have been killed by Qassams since July '06, for a total of 18 since June 2004.

    I feel great concern for the families of each of those killed in those attacks. I feel exactly equal concern for the families of each of the 379 non-combatant Gaza Palestinians killed by the Israeli state's army since January '06. (Actually, more than 379, since the IDF have killed numerous noncombatants in Gaza since January 1 this year.)

    If the "international community" is exercised about Palestinian military actions that have killed 18 noncombatants in Israel since June 2004, how much more exercised should it be about Israeli military actions that have killed 379 Palestinian noncombatants since January 2006?

    2. The Gaza Palestinians still have some very serious and long-unmet political claims against Israel that some of them have been trying to pursue through their use of violence. They and the vast majority of members of the international community consider that, though Israel withdrew its forces and settlers from the heart of the Gaza Strip in 2005, still, its attempt to maintain strict control over all the Strip's land and sea boundaries, and its airspace, mean that Israel still bears the responsibilities of an occupying power in the Strip under international law. These include a responsibility for the welfare of the people living in the Strip.

    Under international law, residents of an occupied territory have a right to resist occupation, including by violent means. The actions of the French maquis or of numerous other resistance organizations throughout history fall into this category. The resisters are, of course, required to use the same due diligence as any other combatants to try to avoid harming civilians.

Clearly, what needs to be resolved in a fair and sustainable way is the underlying, 60-year-old political conflict between Israel and all the Palestinians. The actions the Israelis have been taking against the Gaza Palestinians over the past two years-- both the siege and the disproportionately violent and damaging military campaign-- have not brought a resolution to the political conflict any closer. Indeed, they have further soured the atmosphere for the negotiations that need to be undertaken if a resolution is to be found. (After all, we can all surely see that neither side is capable of imposing a solution on the other at this point.)

In the immediate future, we need to see three things happening between Israel and the Gaza Palestinians:

    1. A ceasefire agreement under which both sides would agree to halt their military operations against the other. The Egyptian government seems ideally placed to help broker this. The ceasefire would be considerably more stable if there is also a politically credible mechanism for monitoring it;

    2. A prisoner-exchange agreement that frees both the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit and a large enough number of the thousands of Palestinian political prisoners held by Israel that the exchange itself can also become a confidence-building measure. (In the past, Israel's stinginess in releasing Palestinian prisoners-- even after agreements have been concluded on this matter-- has often turned the whole business into a confidence-draining measure instead;) and

    3. An end to the siege of Gaza, so that its 1.5 million people can finally get back onto the path of social and economic development and capacity-building rather than still being driven back into the debilitating and humiliating state of having to rely on international relief and hand-outs.

And please, along the way, let's not talk about the Gaza-Israel conflict as though the siege of Gaza and the Palestinian Qassam rockets are the only things that have been happening. They are not. Israel's continued military assaults against the Strip also need to be taken into full account.

Posted by Helena Cobban at 03:40 PM | Comments (35)

January 25, 2008

Gaza scenarios...

It is possible, though at this point highly unlikely-- see my note #1 below-- that the Israeli government will forcefully intervene sometime in the near future to break the link between the Gaza Strip and Egypt that was opened up in such an amazing way on Wednesday through the organized, nonviolent mass action of Gaza's people.

Barring such an intervention, the new direct link between Gaza and Egypt that has been opened up will become in one way or another institutionalized.

Until Wednesday, there was no direct link. The only "direct" crossing point between the two territories, at Rafah, was overseen on the Palestinian side by an EU monitoring group who did their monitoring on behalf of the Israelis, transmitting information about the people crossing through a videolink to Israeli officials working at the nearby "Keren Shalom" freight crossing point linking Gaza and Israel. Rafah was only for persons, not goods; and under the terms of an earlier US-brokered agreement between Israel and the PA, Israel was able to define the limits on who could use it, namely only residents of Gaza crossing in and out, and only I believe with prior approval for their crossing from Israel.

Thus, for example, Gaza Palestinian resident Laila el-Haddad, could on occasion cross in and out with her parents and child. But her Palestinian husband Yassine, who was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon and carries only the laissez-passer that Lebanon issues to Palestinian refugees, could not enter Gaza with his wife and child(ren)-- through Rafah or through any other point.

Anyway, at Israeli insistence, the Rafah crossing has been completely closed for some months now.

Now, the situation at Rafah, and indeed along the length of the 7-mile border between Gaza and Egypt, has changed completely. Today, nobody is exercising any degree of control over the border. But the only bodies with forces nearby who could possibly exert control over it relatively easily are Hamas and the Egyptian government. That is the new reality.

On Wednesday, I wrote that the mass bust-out from Gaza of that day "raises the intriguing possibility that the elected Hamas leaders may now seek to implement a plan they have long had to re-open Gaza's connection with the world economy through Egypt, rather through Israel." Yesterday, Jonathan Edelstein contributed this thoughtful commentary on that possibility. Both he and I referred to the interviews I conducted in Gaza back in March 2006 with the then- newly elected Hamas parliamentary leaders, especially Hamas veteran Dr. Mahmoud Zahhar, with whom I had a fairly lengthy interview in English at that time.

It's worth going back and seeing what he said in that interview, which I wrote up most fully here. It's also worth going to the longer article I published afterwards in Boston Review, in which I explored the emergence of what I called "parallel unilateralisms" between Olmert-ist Israel and the (Hamas-led) Palestinians.

The key difference between this approach to conflict reduction and social stabilization in Israel and Palestine and the "Oslo" approach is that, while the latter depends centrally on folding the Palestinians into an Israeli-dominated economic order and imposing a strongly Israeli-weighted resolution of the conflict onto the Palestinians, a parallel unilateralisms approach sees the two societies each focusing on pursuing its own economic capabilities including economic links with the outside world, while allowing most of the remaining issues of contention between them to remain, for now, unresolved.

My 3/18/06 JWN write-up of the interview with Zahhar included this:

    I asked how he foresaw a Hamas government proceeding in the tricky arena of international trade relations. Ever since the birth of the PA in 1994, its economy has been tied to Israel's much larger, much wealthier economy through an agreement called the ' Paris Agreement', which delineates a single 'customs envelope' around the two countries. Israel exercises complete control over the movement of all goods into and out of Gaza and the West Bank-- and this control continues, even regarding Gaza, and even after last summer's withdrawal of all of Israel's troops and settlers from the body of the Gaza Strip. This control over all avenues for external trade has given Israel a stranglehold over the PA's economy that is even tighter than the one that apartheid South Africa used to exercise over its Bantustans.

    The Paris agreement also allows Israel to control all aspects of bilateral trade between the two entities, a fact that it has exploited by treating the Palestinian areas as a captive markets for its own goods while placing extremely high, often insuperable, barriers on the Palestinians' ability to export their goods to Israel.

    Zahhar spoke with calm determination about the prospect of Gaza breaking out of the Paris Agreement. "An opening of our trade links to Egypt and through our seaport is a first option for us," he said.

      The Israelis have violated all the economic agreements from the Paris Agreement through to the Rafah Agreement [which was concluded with Secretary Rice's help just last November]. So we are not obligated to remain within them.

      If we push ahead with regard to opening our border with Egypt, we can certainly make it work to the benefit of both sides. You know, in September, right after the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza,when our border with Egypt was unsecured-- we learned that our people spent $8 million in El-Arish in just ten days, because the prices of everything in Egypt are so much lower than the prices the Israelis impose on us here.

    I mentioned a concern that some Palestinians had voiced: that if Gaza broke out of the Paris Agreement, this would split it off even more from the West Bank-- an area that remains under much tighter and more pervasive Israeli control than Gaza. Zahhar was unfazed. "Gaza is already cut from the West Bank," he said. He noted that any switch by the Gazans from the customs envelope with Israel to a new economic link with Egypt, "should of course be by arrangement with Egypt."

    He was harshly critical of the record of the Fateh-dominated security services...

I will just add a few quick further notes here. (I am really rushed because I still need to write up last week's interview with Khaled Meshaal properly... I have gotten so behind!)
    1. We still need to look carefully at the capabilities the Israelis and their Bushist allies have to "roll back" the victory Hamas won this week. I haven't given this question adequate thought yet. But my gut instinct is that neither country has much capability to do this-- due to US over-stretch in Iraq and continuing leadership paralysis in Israel. Probably the most they can do is try to contain the extent of the Hamas victory?

    2. If Hamas is successful in pursuing and institutionalizing the Zahharist vision of unilateralism, the situation in Gaza would have many parallels with that in Hizbullah-dominated South Lebanon. With the Cairo government playing the same alliance role to Hamas that the Beirut government back in the Hariri days played to Hizbullah? There are some evident differences. But the relationship between Hamas and Cairo will be key. One problem being, though, that the present government in Cairo feels itself strongly threatened by Hamas's long-time brothers in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Maybe this can only work if there is a new form of entente between Mubarak and the MB in Cairo? Might the Gaza bust-out force this outcome onto Mubarak?

    3. Fateh and its supporters remain, I think, deeply hostile both to Hamas (goes without saying) but also to the idea of Gaza "going it alone" in any way. They want to find a way to reassert Ramullah's rule over Gaza. The Hamas people have reached out to Abu Mazen to ask him to negotiate a new crossing(s) arrangement with Egypt. (Unclear how genuine that invitation to cooperation was?) But Abu Mazen has turned them down. The stage is set for a new form of strategic competition-- this time, perhaps, between the "development model" of Hamas-ruled Gaza and that of the Israel-and-PA-ruled West Bank.

    4. I find Zahhar's argument that Gaza and the WB were already split from each other, so Hamas going it alone in Gaza is not a splittist move, quite convincing. Also, though Palestinians have lived under many different administrations in the region for 60 years now-- under Israeli occupation, under Jordanian and Egyptian occupation before that, as (second-class) citizens of Israel, as exiled refugees outside their homeland, etc... still, the vast majority of them have not abandoned their feeling of being part of one unified Palestinian people.

    5. Re the possibility of Egypt moving in assertively to re-close the border: No, I don't see it as ever being able to close it up as tightly as it had done prior to January 23. Naturally, both Egypt and Hamas have an interest in having some form of control-line either along the existing international border or somewhere close. But Egypt cannot now, I think, return to its previous situation of being Israel's sub-contractor in maintaining the total noose of siege around Gaza. Mubarak tried to maintain that role on Tuesday, but finally decided it put him in an untenable position.

    6. Jonathan wrote about the possible conditions for encouraging "foreign investment" in a liberated-from-Paris Gaza. I don't think we even need to go as far as considering "foreign" investment. But we can look first and foremost at the prospects for Palestinian investment in the Strip if it enters an economic arrangement with Egypt.

    One of the problems the "Oslo" economic plans always encountered was that the many fairly wealthy Palestinians around the world were reluctant to invest very much in Gaza or the West Bank because the territories still remained under Israel's control in the economic and all other domains. They didn't want their big investments to be held hostage by Israel. And the events of April 2002, when Sharon sent his army in to demolish large numbers of the infrastructural and other economic facilities in both territories showed how right they were to be wary. In a Gaza that is on a state of "no negotiations but some degree of mutual deterrence" with Israel, anyone's investments could still-- as we saw in Lebanon in 2006-- be hostage to an outburst of very destructive Israeli "shock and awe-ism." But still, maybe Israel could move away from that? (Okay, perhaps a big "maybe" there; but I'm trying to think aloud here... )

    7. Gaza has a very well-educated population that is thickly connected to the outside world. Every Gaza family has family members who are "outside"-- whether as migrant workers, teachers, bankers, or whatever. (Hence, btw, the huge joy these families felt this week on being able at last to reconnect with loved ones from whom they have long been separated through Israel's maintenance of the movement controls and the even tighter recent siege.) These are huge assets for anyone contemplating the economic rehabilitation of Gaza. It is not a basket-case.

    8. Water and sewage issues will of course be, as Jonathan mentioned, a massive constraint on any sustained growth. One of the first priorities must be to completely rehabilitate the sewage-disposal system, which is in terrible, life-threatening condition. Israel certainly has a continuing responsibility to provide Gaza with adequate supplies of water. The amounts and terms of this water supply can no doubt be negotiated in some way. Water-course-wise, the West Bank, Israel, and Gaza all sit on a series of underground aquifers in which, in general, the water flows from east to west. Right now Israel controls water usage in the West Bank. (Giving, as we know, hugely disproportionate amounts of water to its coddled Jewish settlers there.) It also sits astride the aquifer that flows under Gaza, and by its own depletion of that aquifer has wrecked the quality of the water available to Gaza. A system of water usage based on the equality of all human persons and the provision of water to national communities on a basis proportional to their population, needs to worked out as soon as possible.

Anyway, now I need to hurry back to my real work. I urge you all to go back and read 2006 writings linked to above. And let the conversation continue.

Posted by Helena Cobban at 11:59 AM | Comments (13)

Gaza bust-out: Effects on the regional balance

Our Israeli commenter JES wrote here yesterday that it was notable how little attention was being paid in Israel to the momentous developments in Gaza. Today, Haaretz has a significant editorial chastizing Israel's leaders for their lack of attention to Wednesday's bust-out and underlining the effects the bust-out has been having on the political balance in the region. Its title is quite simply The siege of Gaza has failed.

For my part, I have been struck by the degree to which the bust-out has shown the Hamas leadership's new ability to seize the strategic initiative, to conceive of a bold and unexpected plan, to maintain operational secrecy around implementation of the plan, and to integrate nonviolent civilian mass organizing into its strategic planning.

I also want to note this analysis from HaAretz's long-time regional affairs correspondent Zvi Bar-el, which in many respects I agree with.

He writes:

    At the beginning of the week, it still seemed as though Egypt was "standing firm" against these pressures. Egypt wanted to avoid yet another confrontation with Israel or Washington over the issue of the border crossing...

    But domestic Egyptian considerations gained the upper hand. Hence, too, the tremendous media effort Egypt made this week to establish that they, and no other Arab party, had convinced Israel to lift the sanctions a bit - for example, to transfer fuel and also convoys of medicine to the Strip. The other "Arab party" that claimed the credit was Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas... Khaled Meshal thanked both sides for their efforts, but made it clear that letting through a few more shipments of fuel did not constitute a solution to the problem of the siege.

    The firing of Qassams on Sderot and the response by the Israel Defense Forces, both in killing Palestinians in the Zeitoun neighborhood and in the total closure that was imposed this week, have created a new equation, one that has become so familiar in Lebanon, in which Hamas comes out the winner no matter what. It can determine the number of Qassam rockets that are fired on the town and thus determine a criterion for "relative quiet," "calm" or "noise." It will thus dictate the Israeli response on the ground, and through that - the Arab reaction. Meshal can also determine whether to establish "Grapes of Wrath-type understandings" with Israel concerning Gaza, by means of the hudna (cease-fire) or tahadiyeh (temporary truce) that he has proposed and that has won support in Israel. In this he would also serve to further weaken the status of Abbas, who is not able to stop even one single Qassam.

    Meshal has succeeded in proving to Israel, to the leaders of the Arab world and to the Quartet (the European Union, the United States, Russia and the United Nations), that it will be impossible to discuss the Annapolis resolutions or any other political proposal without Gaza, which is to say - without him.

    Abbas realized this week that as long as there is someone in Gaza who is dictating the mood in all of Palestine, he himself will not be able to be seen in an embrace with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert or Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni again. On Tuesday he did declare that the political negotiations must go on despite the events in Gaza."

    The events in Gaza have made clear to Abbas is that even if he does agree to enter into a political dialogue with Hamas, the points that the organization has accumulated this week, thanks to the suffering of the residents of the Strip, will enable it to dictate the terms of that dialogue.

    It is no wonder that Hamas is again voicing its demand to hold early elections for the Palestinian parliament,

Actually, I am not as confident as Bar-El that Abu Mazen has yet concluded that there's a new balance of power between him and Hamas and that he will necessarily have to distance himself from too close an embrace with Olmert, Livni, and the Americans as a result. Nor am I as confident as he that, as he writes, "both Egypt and Saudi Arabia believe that the most reasonable solution at the moment, considering the lack of confidence in Israel's desire to conduct a serious political process, is to establish a joint Fatah-Hamas Palestinian Authority so that it will be possible at least to solve the problem of Gaza."

Anyway, back to the HaAretz editorial. It says:

    While politicians and the media are waiting with bated breath for publication of the Winograd report on the Second Lebanon War, a new situation is taking shape on the Egyptian border that might eventually result in a new investigative committee. The diplomatic and security situation that arose on the Israeli-Egyptian border once the Egypt-Gaza border was flung wide open has apparently not yet penetrated the Israeli consciousness. But it is time to start asking pointed questions about the events of this week instead of about those of July 2006.
Instead of "instead of" there, I would say they should put "in addition to."

Then this:

    The border with Egypt was breached in a single moment, with no warning. It is impossible to refrain from asking whether any of our decision makers, or any of those who whisper in their ears, foresaw this scenario and prepared for it. When Vice Premier Haim Ramon boasts of the impressive decision-making process that preceded last fall's military operation in Syria, his words sound bizarre in light of what is happening in the South.

    While hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are streaming into Egyptian Rafah and Hosni Mubarak is having trouble reestablishing the border, while Hamas has succeeded in ending the siege of Gaza via a well-planned operation and simultaneously won the sympathy of the world, which has forgotten the rain of Qassam rockets on Sderot, Israel is entrenching itself in positions that look outdated. The prime minister speaks about the need to continue the closure on Gaza, and the cabinet voices its "disappointment" with Egypt - as if there were ever any chance that the Egyptians would work to protect Israeli interests along the Philadelphi route [i.e., the 7-mile border between Gaza and Egypt] instead of thinking first of all of their own interests. The failure of the siege of Gaza, which the government declared only a week ago to be "bearing fruit," and especially the fear that this failure will lead to a conflict with Egypt, requires the government to pull itself together and prove that it has been graced with the ability to solve crises and to lead, not merely to offer endless excuses for its leadership during previous crises.

    As hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were streaming into Sinai by car and making a mockery of Israel's policy in Gaza, the prime minister gave a speech at the Herzliya Conference that sounded disconnected from reality. There is little point in extolling the quiet on the northern border when a diplomatic and security crisis for which Israel has no solution is taking place in the South. The Qassam fire is continuing, the policy of sanctions on Gaza has collapsed and Hamas is growing stronger politically, militarily and diplomatically. It is clear to everyone that reestablishing the border along the Philadelphi route will be impossible without its consent. The confusion that characterized official Israeli responses to the international media shows that the developments in the Gaza Strip took the government completely by surprise.

    In his speech, Ehud Olmert declared: "Mistakes were made; there were failures. But in addition, lessons were learned, mistakes were corrected, modes of behavior were changed and, above all, the decisions we have made since then have led to greater security, greater calm and greater deterrence than there had been for many years." Olmert was referring to the Winograd report. But he categorically ignored the fact that what was happening in the South completely contradicts his statements. If that is what learning lessons looks like, if that is what deterrence means, the Olmert government has precious little to boast about.

I could scarcely have worded it better myself. Good judgments, Haaretz.

Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:30 AM | Comments (3)

January 24, 2008

Jonathan Edelstein's thoughts on the Gaza bust-out

    Note: Jonathan Edelstein is one of the best-informed and wisest analysts of Israeli-Palestinian matters-- among other matters-- whom I have the honor of knowing. He is not, currently, keeping up the "Head Heeb" blog that was a great resource for us all for so long. But he came over here to JWN today and posted some lengthy comments that are worthy of close consideration. So with full atrribution to Jonathan Edelstein here they are...
Helena, I wonder if the bust-out and associated developments represent a revival, or possibly a culmination, of the "parallel unilateralism" strategy that you postulated for Hamas after the January 2006 election. [Note from HC: Actually, as I later told Jonathan, I already wrote a bit about this yesterday.] During the spring and summer of 2006, some of the Hamas ministers were talking about ending Gaza's economic dependence on Israel and realigning the economy with the Arab world, which at least for the time being means Egypt in practical terms. Hamas has now taken a rather forceful step toward doing just that.

This might also lead, to some extent, to a revival of Israeli unilateralism. After the initial shock, some senior Israeli officials began spinning the bust-out as an opportunity for Israel to disengage from Gaza economically, and I don't think that's entirely spin. There's some interesting analysis along those lines in today's Yediot.

As for Bob Spencer's speculation that Gaza might "become some sort of loosely associated part of Egypt," I wonder if it might end up more the other way. I did some speculating of my own about the Gaza-Sinai relationship in late 2005, at the time the Rafah crossing reopened and before the rocket-closure-raid cycle started developing its own logic. The key points were that Gaza has six times the population of North Sinai governorate, that there was more money in Gaza than in that part of Egypt, that Egyptian security control in that region was tenuous and that the ports of al-Arish and Port Said had the potential to become a key Palestinian import-export route. All these, except possibly the second, remain true, and given that it will be a political impossibility for Mubarak to re-close the border (although he has built walls against his own Bedouin citizens), Sinai al-Shamaliyya might end up becoming a de facto Palestinian economic appendage. Interesting times.

I'll close by questioning received wisdom, noting a legal paradigm shift, and indulging in some wild speculation.

Questioning received wisdom: I think we've been wrong all along in describing the siege of Gaza as an Israeli siege. In fact, ever since Israel left the Philadelphi route, it's been an Israeli-Egyptian siege, and Egypt has maintained its end for its own reasons. Hamas correctly perceived Egypt as the military and political weak link, and chose to break the siege at the Egyptian border. I've actually wondered why it took so long; there have been partial breaches of the wall before, and I remember thinking at the time that Hamas would gain an advantage by widening them. Maybe it wasn't yet ready, but I think it's now very clear that they and Israel were never the only players.

The paradigm shift: now that the Egyptian border is open, Gaza can no longer be regarded as Israeli-occupied territory. Some scholars such as Dugard maintain that the occupation continued after the 2005 withdrawal because Israel continued to control the access points. I've argued in the past that international law precedents, such as the ICJ's judgment in the DRC-Uganda case, don't support this interpretation and that the occupation ended once Israel gave up effective control on the ground. At this point, however, the argument is moot: as long as the Egyptian border stays open, Gaza can't seriously be regarded as occupied even under Dugard's interpretation. This would mean that the law of belligerent occupation no longer applies to Gaza, although the humanitarian law of war, including the provisions relating to siege, still do. Israel is no longer legally responsible (note: legal and moral responsibilities aren't necessarily the same) for the general welfare of Gaza, or for supplying its people with goods like electricity or fuel.

And now the wild speculation: On the hopeful side, this is a potential chance for Gaza to get its act together. The Palestinians have, to put it bluntly, choked on Gaza several times, and neither the PNA nor Hamas has been able to control the place sufficiently to govern it or to institute an effective cease-fire. Israel has been partly responsible for this state of affairs but so has Palestinian infighting and the prevalence of splinter militias. If Hamas can re-establish an economy in Gaza and use the popularity that it has surely gained from this move to consolidate its authority, then it might be able to work out a mutual cease-fire on the Israeli border, position itself as a responsible diplomatic player, and maybe even reduce the perceived risk of Gaza by enough to attract foreign investment. This would in turn increase the pressure on both Israel and Fatah to move toward ending the occupation in the West Bank, because otherwise Hamas would be able to point to its success in Gaza as the only viable alternative.

Working against this is the fact that Egypt will now take a major security interest in Gaza, given that a linkup between Hamas and the Egyptian ikhwan is Mubarak's worst nightmare. As noted above, it's politically impossible at the moment for him to close the border, but he isn't going to just leave a Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated political organization alone. I think we can expect to see Egyptian security forces infiltrate Gaza in the near future, primarily in covert roles, and there's a potential for major disruption if this turns into an undeclared Hamas-Egypt war.

Of course, the reverse might also happen - that Hamas would expand its security interests to include north Sinai. If the route to al-Arish becomes its lifeline, then it will want to protect its access to that route, and might find allies among the local Bedouins who are in effective revolt against the central government. I think Hamas wants to avoid this kind of entanglement, which is why it's trying so hard now to come to an agreement with Egypt on border control, but I don't think the possibility of Hamas strongholds or patrols in Sinai can be ruled out. This in turn would raise tensions along the Israel-Egypt border due to the increased possibility of infiltration.

There is now an opportunity for the Gaza crisis to either resolve into a new metastable arrangement, or to expand. I know which one I hope will happen, and I also know that I'm afraid the other will.

    Posted by: Jonathan Edelstein at January 24, 2008 11:45 AM
I see that about two thirds of the above comment came after I said I was going to "close." Famous last words.

Anyway, two more observations: First, I wonder if Hamas will open Gaza to the Palestinians living in the Lebanese refugee camps, who are the worst-off of the refugees and have recently been hard hit by the Lebanese security forces. If Hamas wants propaganda victories - which it obviously does - then that could be a big one, and possibly a humanitarian victory as well.

Second, water will continue to be the bottleneck for Gaza even if the border stays open. It can get fuel, food and other supplies either from Egypt or through Port Said and al-Arish (the latter of which has recently been upgraded), but Egypt can't supply water given its own scarcity, and importing the volume that Gaza needs to develop would be logistically difficult. This may preclude a complete economic disengagement between Gaza and Israel, at least in the immediate term. Do you have any idea how Hamas intends to go about resolving this situation?

    Posted by: Jonathan Edelstein at January 24, 2008 11:57 AM
On a not-entirely-unrelated topic, this may also be of interest.
Thanks, Jonathan!

Gosh, I wish I had time start thinking more about all the questions you raise... But I really don't as I'm crashing on several deadlines. It would be great for everyone else to jump on in with their responses to these questions.

Posted by Helena Cobban at 01:37 PM | Comments (26)

More on Gaza-Egypt

Hamas's Palestine Information Center has these items:

    1. "Haneyya: The [Palestinian caretaker] government is ready to hold urgent talks with Egypt regarding Rafah." Includes this:

      Khaled Mishaal, the head of Hamas political bureau, called for putting the borders between Egypt and Gaza under the supervision of Egyptians and Palestinians only and ignoring any previous agreements detracting from the sovereignty of the two countries.

      Mishaal underscored that Egypt did not sign the agreement in 2006 regarding the management of the Rafah crossing; thus, it is not bound by it, adding that Hamas is ready to cooperate with Egypt and the PA leadership to regulate the borders between Egypt and Gaza.

    2. "PA leadership turns down Haneyya's crossings offer." Including this:

      The London-based Ashark Al-Awsat newspaper quoted Nimir Hammad, the political advisor to PA chief Mahmoud Abbas, as saying that [Hamas's offer to coordinate with Ramallah and Egypt over the crossings issue] was rejected.

      He said that the PA presidency would not negotiate Hamas over anything until it revokes results of its "coup" and would not negotiate with it over the crossings in particular because it had nothing to do with the issue!

      Haneyya had expressed readiness in a televised address on Wednesday to hold an urgent meeting with "brothers in Egypt and Ramallah" to agree on preparations for opening the Rafah border terminal and other crossings surrounding the Gaza Strip.

      For its part, the Fatah faction refused Haneyya's invitation.

And Debka-file has this item:
    1. "Israeli officials [unidentified]... wonder why defense minister Ehud Barak has not cut short his attendance at the Economic Forum in Switzerland when the blockade he ordered on the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip - but for fuel and other necessities – had become futile.
Note: I just deleted one reference to a Debka-file piece above, since it seemed both unsubstantiated and alarmist. Commenters Jonathan Edelstein and JES, whose views and information base I respect, have pointed out that DF is not a reliable source on its own. Generally, I agree. But I think some of their reporting on the current developments is revealing.

Posted by Helena Cobban at 09:28 AM | Comments (0)

US-led force to leave part of Sinai? This is huge!

Debka-file started reporting at 9:38 a.m. GMT today that early today,

    American forces and equipment withdrew from the Multi-force Organization base at Al Gura northeast of al Arish. This force monitors Sinai’s demilitarization under a key clause of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty. Washington and Cairo are discussing evacuating the entire base and its 400 multinational personnel. The Egyptian high command was informed that Hamas had begun moving some of its elite units to its new stronghold. Egyptian forces are not capable of contending with this strength or the hundreds of thousands of Gazan Palestinians on the move between Gaza and Sinai since Hamas blew up the concrete border fence Tuesday.
If true-- and I have no reason to doubt that it is-- then this is huge.

The Multi-National Force and Observers (MFO) was created in 1979 as a US-led "coalition of the willing" force tasked with monitoring implementation of the 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. If the force is now being redeployed (=withdrawn) from the area bordering Gaza, that is already a major development. But now, in addition, Egypt and Washington are discussing evacuating the El-Gorah base, which is one of the MFO's two main operating bases?

The political crisis in Cairo provoked by yesterday's bust-out of Palestinians from Gaza into Sinai seems to be much deeper than I had previously thought.

(By the way, when I linked to a Debka-file report on the Gaza-Egypt situation in this JWN post yesterday, the URL there was the same as the URL linked to above. DF should understand that it's confusing for readers when they almost completely change the content of a published file after publication! I imagine that very diligent readers who want to find the whole text of the earlier DF report could do so by searching through caches?)

Posted by Helena Cobban at 09:24 AM | Comments (4)

January 23, 2008

As Bush sows, so Hamas reaps?

I just want to add to all my previous posts here on the Gaza Palestinians' bust-out of earlier today that the political ground for this intriguing new move was sown in good part by President Bush's amazingly maladroit trip around the Middle East over the past two weeks.

During the trip, Bush underlined again and again his intense concern for Israelis, their security, and their every last little whim. But he turned a notably deaf ear to the pleas he heard from all his most ardent Arab friends that he do something to demonstrate some concern for the hardships being suffered by the Palestinians and some real resolve to stop, for example, Israel's continued illegal encroachments on Palestinian land and the harsh-- and also illegal-- collective punishments it has been imposing on the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank for many years now.

Bush even attempted to publicly "joke" about of the hundreds of much-hated checkpoints/chokepoints that have been choking any semblance of ordinary life in the West Bank for many years, and jovially urged the Palestinians to just "forget about" the whole string of UN resolutions that underline what their rights to their own lands and to a decent life thereon really are.

During Bush's visit to the region, Israel escalated its military attacks against the Gaza Palestinians. Much of the media in Syria and Lebanon, where I was until yesterday, was full of commentary to the effect that Bush gave Israel a "green light" to do that and also to tighten the screws of the siege it has maintained on Gaza for many years now.

Is it in any wonder that in these circumstances Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak evidently feels he can do nothing to intervene to re-close the wall between Gaza and Egypt, and no other Arab leaders are prepared to step forward to help to stem the tide of Hamas's growing power?

Posted by Helena Cobban at 08:58 PM | Comments (8)

Debka-file's interesting take on the Gaza bust-out

Here's how Israel's Debka-file reported* on today's Gaza bust-out:

    Senior [Israeli] military sources told DEBKAfile that the strategic feat achieved by Hamas Tuesday night, in capturing a section of Sinai from Egyptian forces, is irreversible. Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert held tense talks on the crisis Wednesday night, Jan. 23.

    By demolishing the 10-km concrete barrier dividing the Gaza Strip from Egyptian Sinai, Hamas, backed by 200,000 Palestinians who surged across Wednesday, has acquired a new stronghold outside Israel’s military reach.

And here's how they reported the Egyptian political dimension:
    [Condi] Rice and David Welch, assistant secretary of state for the Middle East, made a point of warning Mubarak that he must act expeditiously to restore border security because the entire Washington Palestinian strategy hinging on Abbas and the Annapolis declarations hangs in the balance.

    But the Egyptian president replied that his main worry is not the Palestinian issue but concern that his own opposition, led by the Muslim Brotherhood, may adopt Hamas tactics and stir up trouble in his cities. Mubarak said he would leave the situation in northern Sinai as it is for the time being.

What did I tell you?

I see that Hamas's spokesman in Gaza, Dr. Sami Abu Zuhri, has meanwhile described Egypt as,

    the natural depth of the Palestinian people, adding that the Gaza people want to break their subjection to the Israeli occupation which blackmail them everyday with their basic needs; instead, they need their basics to come from their Arab nation rather than the occupation and this was what pushed them to rush towards the Rafah crossing.

    The spokesman pointed out that the leadership of Hamas along with the Palestinian government in Gaza is conducting contacts with the Egyptian leadership to rearrange some issues about the Rafah crossing and also to find solutions to end the suffering of Gaza people.

The story continues...

---
* Update Thursday morning: I just tried to revisit that Debka-File URL linked to there and found that the content quoted here has been replaced by some other extremely important content, which I comment on here.

Posted by Helena Cobban at 04:26 PM | Comments (5)

And I can now reveal...

...that last week in Damascus I interviewed Hamas head Khaled Mishaal and Palestinian Islamic Jihad head Ramadan Shallah.

More-- including as soon as possible a link to the audio from both full interviews-- to follow.

My first bottom line: Mishaal very definitely talked about being interested, under certain circumstances, in a ceasefire between Gaza and Israel. (However, he notably didn't tell me about any plans for an imminent "bust-out" from Gaza! Why didn't he tell me all their secret plans, I wonder?)

I'm just working on making the best possible plan to report on/disseminate what I got in these interviews. They provide a good complement and updating to a lot of my earlier reporting on Palestinian issues (and also, to the reporting I did in February 2007 on the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.)


Posted by Helena Cobban at 02:28 PM | Comments (0)

Gaza bust-out: Past plans and future prospects

This report from the London Times's James Hider strongly indicates that the demolition of vast long stretches of the wall between Gaza and Egypt had been long planned by Gaza's present Hamas rulers. Hider writes-- and the accompanying photo also indicates-- that,

    a Hamas border guard interviewed by The Times at the border today admitted that the Islamist group... had been involved for months in slicing through the heavy metal wall using oxy-acetylene cutting torches.

    That meant that when the explosive charges were set off in 17 different locations after midnight last night the 40ft wall came tumbling down, leaving it lying like a broken concertina down the middle of no-man's land as an estimated 350,000 Gazans flooded into Egypt.

The accompanying photo certainly shows indications of considerable amounts of cutting.

Hider also writes:

    As Gazans flooded into Egypt, the strip's Hamas prime minister, Ismail Haniya, called for an urgent meeting with his rivals in Fatah and with the Egyptian authorities to work a new border arrangement.

    Mr Haniya called for the border crossing to be reopened "on the basis of national participation," meaning that Hamas would be prepared to cede some control to President Abbas and his Fatah-led government in the West Bank. "We don’t want to be the only ones in control of these matters," Mr Haniyeh said, speaking from his Gaza City office live on Hamas TV.

The downing of the wall may well have been planned to coincide with the opening of the current, Hamas-led conference of Palestinian oppositionists in Damascus, Syria.

Here is a Reuters report of the conference's first day.

The Hamas people argue that their actions are not aimed at undermining Palestinian national unity. But very evidently the big bust-out from Gaza is a major embarrassment to PA president Mahmoud Abbas, who has so far had little or nothing to show for his insistence on pursuing the Palestinians' grievances only through the US-sponsored peace talks with Israel. Abbas has been able to do little but sit idly by, voicing occasional and unheeded protests, while Israel tightened its siege around Gaza over recent weeks.

I spent the past few days in Beirut. (I got back to the US yesterday.) It strikes me that Hamas's opening of Gaza's wall with Egypt could make the situation between Egypt and Israel somewhat analogous to that between Lebanon and Israel?

Recall also the plans Gaza's Hamas leaders have long talked about their hope of reconnecting Gaza to the outside world through Egypt rather than through Israel, as I wrote about here and here and elsewhere.

What is clear already is that the Gaza bust-out has considerably upped the political stakes for Egypt's president Hosni Mubarak. His regime's survival may now be at stake.

Who can reimpose order on the Gaza-Egypt situation? Israel? I doubt it. Egypt? Very risky indeed. Fateh without coordinating with Hamas? Impossible. A hastily assembled NATO peacekeeping force? Forget about it...

This is, it strikes me, Hamas's bid to become included in the decisionmaking order. I truly don't see any resolution to the present situation without Hamas being a party to it.

This story will continue to be big.

Posted by Helena Cobban at 01:41 PM | Comments (0)

Gaza's opening to Egypt

At dawn this morning, Palestine-Israel time, masked gunmen set explosive charges that felled much of the high wall that has separated Israeli-occupied Gaza from Egypt since the conclusion of Israel's peace with Egypt in 1979. That opening burst a massive hole through the situation of tight siege that Israel has maintained on Gaza's 1.5 million people since 2000.

Gaza's people were quick to take advantage. If you look at the sat photo at the bottom of this BBC news report you can see for about one-third of its length, the Gaza-Israel boundary cuts through the edge of the heavily populated city of Rafah. (Built-up zones appear as brown on the image.) People from throughout Gaza crossed into Egypt to buy basic commodities to take back into the Strip. We can only speculate over what other kinds of goods are being carted into the Strip, but they may well include military supplies.

Hamas's "caretaker government" in Gaza, elected in a free and fair territories-wide election in January 2006, reportedly moved quickly to take control of the blasted-apart border, closing all of it except for two gaps, over which it maintained control.

This development raises the intriguing possibility that the elected Hamas leaders may now seek to implement a plan they have long had to re-open Gaza's connection with the world economy through Egypt, rather through Israel, which has sustained a monopoly on all of Gaza's links with the outside world since it brought the Strip under Israeli military occupation in 1967. (I wrote about how Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahhar discussed that plan in a March 2006 interview with me, here and elsewhere.)

These developments will also, quite evidently, affect the political situation inside Egypt, where Hamas's allies from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood form the main opposition to the .US-backed president Hosni Mubarak. Demonstrators in Egypt have been stepping up their demonstrations calling on Mubarak to lift the siege of Gaza.

Yesterday and today Mubarak hit back with harsh repression, detaining scores of MB activists and beating protesters in Cairo's central Tahrir Square with sticks.

On Tuesday, Hundreds of Palestinian women and children organized a mass, nonviolent confrontation with the Egyptian troops tasked with maintaining the Israeli-coordinated siege at the previous sole crossing-point between Gaza and Egypt, at Rafah. At the behest of the Israelis and Americans, Egypt had been keeping that crossing completely closed in recent weeks.

Also of great note: People I talked with during my just-completed trip to Lebanon and Syria all said that public opinion in the Arab world believes strongly that during President Bush's recent visit to the region he gave a "green light" to Israel to escalate its campaign of military and economic violence against Gaza.

On Tuesday night, the UN Security Council considered the issue of the tight Israeli siege against Gaza. This report from Xinhua makes clear that the "draft presidential statement" prepared by the SC's current president, Libya, dealt only with Israel's collective, economic violence against Gaza's people and not with either Israel's disproportionate use of military violence against targets in Gaza or the use by Hamas and other Gaza-based militant groups of primitive, almost untargeted rocket fire against targets inside Israel.

But even though the draft statement dealt only with the immediate humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and not with either aspect of the military confrontation between the two sides,US representative Zal Khalilzad still said it was "unacceptable."

Twelve Israeli civilians have died because of ordnance launched from Gaza in the past seven years. 360 Palestinian civilians-- along with some 450 accused Palestinian "militants"-- are reported to have died because of Israeli military attacks against Gaza within just the past two years. Khalilzad and far too many other members of the western political elites tend to mention only Israel's casualties from the ongoing military confrontation between the two sides, and fail to mention the far greater number of civilian Palestinian casualties from it.

So last night, the Security Council was unable to come out in support of any statement at all about the Gaza crisis. They are supposed to discuss it again today...

Meantime, I'd love to know whether any negotiations, and of what kind, are underway between Egypt and Hamas?

Posted by Helena Cobban at 11:23 AM | Comments (4)

January 21, 2008

Gaza crisis: Where is the 'West'?

I have been reading the latest round of upsetting reports (portal here) on the horrendous effects on Gaza's 1.45 million people of the greatly escalated collective punishment that the US-funded and US-backed Government of Israel has been inflicting on them in recent days.

The fact of this collective punishment is not new. It has been sustained in a systematic and intentional way since 2000, if not before. It saw one noticeable escalation after the Palestinians' January 2006 parliamentary elections-- in what was quite clearly a move to punish the Gaza Palestinians for the choice they made in those elections. It saw a further escalation in the past two weeks-- even while President Bush was touring the region expressing promises about the imminent arrival of "independence" for the Palestinians.

Three things are going on between the well-established and well-supported State of Israel and the extremely vulnerable and effectively stateless community of Gaza Palestinians:

    1. The State of Israel's collective punishment against all the Gaza Palestinians: men, women, and children.

    2. The State of Israel's pursuit of continued military operations against suspected militants inside Gaza, using its army's very considerable firepower in a way that has also-- and quite predictably-- killed and wounded many Palestinian noncombatants. And

    3. The use by Palestinian militants from a number of organizations including, now, Hamas of military operations, generally of a very low-tech variety, and including the launching of primitive-- and in practice, almost untargetable-- rockets of a low degree of lethality against areas of southern Israel that include both civilian and some military targets.

Every single harm suffered by noncombatants in this asymmetrical contest is to be deeply regretted. All parties to armed conflict, whether states or non-state actors, are under an international-law obligation to do their utmost to avoid entangling noncombatants in their military contest.

The Israeli paper HaAretz recently noted that 810 Palestinians were killed by the IDF in Gaza in the two years 2006 and 2007, with some 360 of those judged by HaAretz to have been civilians. Meanwhile, in the seven years since 2001 twelve people in Israel have been killed by military actions launched from Gaza. That's how asymmetrical the military aspect of this contest in. International actors who treat the IHL violations of the two sides as broadly commensurate fail to understand that.

And then, in addition to their very numerous casualties from that military contest, the Palestinians are also suffering the casualties from the collective punishment regime imposed on them by Israel.

So what has been the response to this situation from governments, intergovernmental bodies, and non-governmental organizations in the currently dominant "western" portion of the world?

From the US government: silence.

From the US-based "human-rights" organizations, as far as I can see: silence.

From the EU's Commissioner for External Relations, Bentita Ferrero-Waldner today, this:

    I condemn the rocket fire into Israel and we fully understand Israel's need to defend its citizens. I have called for an immediate ceasefire.

    However, the recent decision to close all border crossings into Gaza as well as to stop the provision of fuel will exacerbate an already dire humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip and risks escalating an already difficult situation on the ground...

Notice there that, regarding military actions, she doesn't even mention Israel's numerous and extremely damaging military operations against Gaza!

Notice, too, the unsatisfactory nature of the policy prescription she ends with:

    "Neither the blockade nor the recent military strikes are able to prevent the rocket attacks [against Israel.] Only a credible political agreement this year, as foreseen at Annapolis, can turn Palestinians away from violence. That is why we must support Prime Minister Olmert and President Abbas in their current efforts."
I agree with her first sentence there. But note that she then specifies that only the Annapolis-based peace process is capable of "turning the Palestinians away from violence." But the Gaza Palestinians were in no way represented at Annapolis. Plus-- and this an even greater error here-- she is assuming that it is only the Palestinians who need to be "turned away from violence"???? That this whole pesky problem in Gaza has arisen because only the Palestinians have this primitive urge to use violence?

I wonder what she calls the things Israel has been doing to the Palestinians? Non-violence?

Here was UN Sec-Gen Ban Ki-Moon's statement on Friday:

    The Secretary-General appeals urgently for an immediate end to the violence now engulfing Gaza and affecting communities in southern Israel. He repeats his earlier calls for an immediate cessation of Palestinian sniper and rocket attacks into Israel, and for maximum restraint on the part of the Israel Defense Forces. He reminds the parties, once again, of their obligation to comply with international humanitarian law and not to endanger civilians.

    Of particular concern today, in addition to the upsurge in violence, is the decision by Israel to close the crossing points in between Gaza and Israel used for the delivery of humanitarian assistance...

    The Secretary-General expresses his deep concern that the hostilities taking place on the ground will undermine the hopes for peace generated by the political process begun at Annapolis.

That statement was, I think, somewhat more balanced and politically realistic than Ms. Ferrero-Waldner's.

Speical kudos, meanwhile, should go to Oxfam for their continued following of the (anti-)humanitarian effects of Israel's continued tightening of the blocade on Gaza, including this statement today.

And to the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, John Dugard, for this statement from January 18, which rightly foregrounds the effects on Palestinian civilians of Israel's military actions in Gaza and is worth quoting in its entirety:

    The killing of some forty Palestinians in Gaza in the past week, the targeting of a Government office near a wedding party venue with what must have been foreseen loss of life and injury to many civilians, and the closure of all crossings into Gaza raise very serious questions about Israel's respect for international law and its commitment to the peace process. Recent action violates the strict prohibition on collective punishment contained in the Fourth Geneva Convention. It also violates one of the basic principles of international humanitarian law that military action must distinguish between military targets and civilian targets. Israel must have known about the wedding party in Gaza near to the interior ministry when it launched missiles at the ministry building. Those responsible for such cowardly action are guilty of serious war crimes and should be prosecuted and punished for their crimes. The United States and other states which attended the Annapolis conference are under both a legal and a moral obligation to compel Israel to cease its actions against Gaza and to restore confidence in the peace process, ensure respect for international law and protect civilian life.
Readers may ask why Dugard did not mention the casualties from the Palestinians' rocket attacks against Israel. I imagine this is because his mandate is precisely to look at the human rights situation in the occupied territories. Evidently, though, in any broader consideration of the Gaza-Israel military conflict and its effects, the casualties among Israelis should of course be fully noted.

But it is also worth recalling just why the UN felt it needed to appoint a special rapporteur on the situation of the people of the OPTs. That was, I think, precisely because the members of the UN General Assembly recognized the particularly vulnerable situation of people who are still stateless and cannot rely on having any state intervene to protect their interests or even their lives.

Kudos, too, to B'tselem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories and its allies, who have been petitioning the Israeli High Court to issue an interim order requiring Israel to allow the return of the supply of fuel oil to Gaza to its usual level. This request, B'tselem says, "was filed as part of a petition against the sanctions on the Gaza Strip, from October 2007."

And meantime, let's not forget the many dimensions of the assault that Palestinians in the West Bank continue to suffer at the hands of the military occupation regime that has ruled over them for 40.5 years now.

AFP reported yesterday that,

    The number of Jewish settlers living in the occupied West Bank excluding annexed Arab east Jerusalem rose by 5.1 percent last year, figures released by the Israeli interior ministry on Sunday showed.

    The Jewish population increased to 282,362 in January this year compared to 268,163 in January 2007 and 253,371 in the first month of 2006.

    The figures exclude a further 200,000 or so settlers in east Jerusalem which Israel annexed following its capture in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

So much for Israel's obligations under Annapolis and the "Road Map"...

Posted by Helena Cobban at 01:21 PM | Comments (16)

January 20, 2008

Two to Tango, or what did Khamenehi really say?

Among the spin-off benefits of a US-Iran hotline, as suggested by R.K. Ramazani in the previous entry, is the possibility that it "could help restore Iran-U.S. diplomatic relations...." As he explained,

"Contrary to widely held myths, Iran has never closed its door to diplomatic relations with the United States. Khomeini left the door ajar "if America behaves itself," that is, if the United States refrains from imposing its will on Iran. His successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, subscribes to the Khomeini line, saying that Iran's lack of contacts with the United States "does not mean that we will not have relations indefinitely."

Yet just this past week, the hawkishly neoconservative "Committee on the Present Danger" (CPD) repeats the myth. In an essay proclaiming that "It takes two to tango," to have a diplomatic relations, to have a "grand bargain," the Iranians are portrayed as not being willing to dance. To the contrary, CPD invokes segments from a recent speech by Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenehi:

“Cutting ties with the United States is one of our basic policies,” Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, told students in the central city of Yazd just days ago. And while “[w]e have never said that they will be cut for ever,” Khamenei explained, “[t]he conditions of the U.S. government are such now that it is harmful for us to resume relations... Despite some talkative people’s claims, it has no benefit for the Iranian nation.”

CPD concludes that this "pours more than a little cold water on the suggestion that Washington should push for an immediate rapprochement with Tehran... (as) the ruling ayatollahs don’t seem interested in mending fences."

This is selective and disingenuous cherry picking for a negative spin. Here's the full passage of the January 3rd speech in question, without ellipses, as made available via BBC World Service.** (see note below) This is from a translation of a long report provided by Tehran Radio (Voice of the Islamic Republic). Emphasis added and my comments follow:

The leader of the Islamic revolution [Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamene'i] referred to relations with America and said: The cutting of relations with the US is one of our principle policies. However, we have never said that these relations will be suspended indefinitely. On the contrary, the US government's present state is such that the establishment of such relations is currently to our detriment. So we should not pursue such relations.

The leader outlined the harm of establishing relations with the US and reiterated: First, the establishment of such relations will not lessen the danger posed by the US because that country had political relations with Iraq when it attacked it. Secondly, the establishment of these relations will prepare the ground for the growth of Americans' influence in the country and the travel of their intelligence officers and spies to and from Iran. As a result, this is why contrary to the claims made by some talkative people [inside the country] these relations have no benefit for the Iranian nation. Undoubtedly, when the day comes that relations with America will benefit the Iranian nation, I will be the first person to endorse these relations.

The leader added: Some accuse us of promoting enmity with America. However, that country's enmity towards the Iranian nation is not based on the [Iranian] president and other people's harsh interpretations. On the contrary, they are against the principles of the Iranian nation and such a thing has existed since the beginning of the Islamic revolution.

I have been reading Khamenehi speeches and Friday Prayer Sermons for 24 years, dating to when he became President amid the Iran-Iraq War. Khamenehi has long been more adaptable in his "open door foreign policy" pronouncements than commonly understood in the west. (I may prepare a full article just on this narrow, yet critical question about Iran's "dance" with the question of if and under what circumstances it can renew ties to America.)

Yet to be brief on just this speech, consider:

1. Quite in line with Professor Ramazani's analysis, Khamenehi yet again emphasizes that there's no automatic bar to improving ties to the US. Characteristically, he cites the revolutionary hallmark, the cutting of the old ties to America, what became the signature "neither East nor West" revolutionary dictum, so that Iran might be independent and "self-confident," that it might be free from the relations between "the lion and the lamb." All that not forgotten, "we have never said that these relations will be suspended indefinitely."

2. The standard objections and grievances to current US policy are noted. Talks and relations in themselves can bring dangers to Iran, despite the hopes of "talkative people" (e.g., Iranian reformists and pragmatists in Iran).

3. Khamenehi also delivers a back-handed lame defense of Iran's lightning-rod President when he notes that America's enmity towards Iran predated Ahmadinejad's "harsh interpretations." The fact that Khamenehi is even referencing Iranian criticisms of Ahmadinejad for "promoting enmity with America" startled many observers, and was interpreted as quite a slap.

4. Totally left out of the CPD report is the not so subtle message to America: "The US government's present state is such that the establishment of such relations is currently to our detriment." Hint, hint America: it doesn't have to be this way. The US government might change, and it logically then follows that better relations might not be to Iran's detriment.

5. As a friend suggested in a closed forum, it may also be that Khamenehi is signaling Iranian contenders in the pending Parliamentary and Presidential elections that they may campaign more creatively on foreign policy, to shield them from ideological "heat."

6. Shamelessly omitted from the CPD essay is Khamenehi's kicker: "Undoubtedly, when the day comes that relations with America will benefit the Iranian nation, I will be the first person to endorse these relations."

That day may be sooner that the CPD and neocon naysayers think - say, if somebody reminds Bush Jr. of Bush Sr.'s inaugural Address (the one about "goodwill begetting goodwill") or, by this time next year, when two new Presidents are in the wings.

(**Footnote: Curiously, the US government's parallel translation service - the Open Source Center (formerly FBIS) data base available to the public via World News Connection - does not include the report on this speech. I've seen this happen before -- somebody at OSC and WNC owes us an explanation)

Posted by Scott Harrop at 02:25 AM | Comments (3)

January 19, 2008

How to Prevent War at the Strait of Hormuz

R.K. Ramazani weighs in with an essay on how to prevent military incidents at the Strait of Hormuz from catalyzing war between Iran and the United States. Ramazani, known widely as "the Dean of Iran Foreign Policy Studies," quite literally "wrote the book" on this subject, The Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. What he wrote on the eve of the Iranian revolution remains a compelling read.

In his current essay, Ramazani, an Emeritus University of Virginia Professor of Government & Foreign Affairs, sets out the stakes and his key argument.:

"The recent naval encounter between the US and Iran extended their cold war for the first time to the strategic Strait of Hormuz. Such incidents could escalate into armed conflict, with catastrophic consequences for the world economy, especially the price of oil. To prevent such escalation, Washington and Tehran should establish a "hot line" and an Incident-at-Sea agreement as Washington and Moscow did during the Cold War."

The need for such a de-conflict mechanism (a regular theme here at jwn) was amply demonstrated by Bush Administration rhetoric:

"... instead of calming down the situation and seeking a creative way of preventing such encounters from escalating into confrontation in the future, the Bush administration increased tensions by exaggerating the episode as if it were a real crisis.

President Bush depicted the maneuver of the Iranian speed boats as "a provocative act," linked it to America's dispute with Iran over the nuclear issue, and declared that Iran was, is and continues to be a threat if it is "allowed to learn how to enrich uranium." Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates categorically dismissed the view that the Iranian sailors had behaved in a fully proper manner, and the State Department formally protested the actions of the Iranian patrol boats. "

The Republican Presidential candidates, Ron Paul notably excepted, were besides themselves with fevered war talk. While evidence is emerging that the Administration consciously "embellished," if not blatantly fabricated key aspects of the incident, Ramazani focuses on the strategic context and the need for caution:

"Such hyperbolic charges reveal a dismal lack of understanding of Iran's unmatched geo-strategic position at the Strait, and of the conception held by the Iranian leaders about the Strait's security in times of peace and war. Recognizing Iran's vital interest in the Strait is a crucial first step to establishing a hot line between Washington and Tehran.

Geo-strategically, the narrow and shallow Strait of Hormuz constitutes, as I coined it in 1979, the world's "global chokepoint." Oil tankers carrying Gulf oil exports must pass through the Strait before traversing the Bab al-Mandab and Suez Canal waterways to the Eastern Mediterranean or the sea lanes of the Strait of Malacca in the Pacific Ocean.

As the dominant Persian Gulf power at this "chokepoint," Iran stands as the "global gatekeeper" for world oil markets. Iran's territorial water abuts the entire eastern shore of the Strait, and numerous Iranian islands dot the sea lanes of the Strait. "

Some financial analysts last summer lamely tried to downplay the significance of the Strait of Hormuz today, claiming that the US could withstand oil shocks were a hot war in the Gulf break out. One remembers the argument that invading Iraq would be a "self-funding" war.

Such "optimism" avoids a sober look at just how much oil transits the Strait of Hormuz. Consider figures from the US Government's Energy Information Agency. According to the EIA, "oil flows through the Straits of Hormuz account for roughly two-fifths of all global crude oil and petroleum product tanker shipments."

That is, 40% of the world's oil traffic by sea must first pass through the Strait of Hormuz. Various alternate pipelines across Turkey and the Arabian Peninsula, even if they could accommodate extra traffic and be kept open in time of conflict, cannot possibly take up the 17 million barrels per day presently exiting via the Hormuz Strait. Never mind the analysts, the oil traders know better: the very talk of military clashes in Hormuz sent oil futures spirally up another 10%.

Yet in this regard, Iran and the world community have a shared set of interests. The world needs the oil; Iran needs to export it. Any Iranian leader, of any political stripe, would agree -- with one caveat:

"Iran considers the safe passage of all ships through the international waters of the Strait as inseparable from its vital interest in the security of the Persian Gulf. Iran's oil, the backbone of its economy, needs to be exported through the Strait. Ideologically Iranian policy makers view the Strait as a "divine blessing" and strategically they see it as Iran's "key asset" in any "defensive war."

Tehran is committed to the right of transit passage for all ships through the Strait. Yet any prolonged obstruction of Iran's oil exports by perceived enemies such as the United States could prompt Iran to retaliate by blocking the Strait. This guiding principle was set by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini during the Iraq-Iran war. He warned that if Iran's oil exports through the Strait were interrupted by hostile acts, Iran would prevent "the passage of a single drop of petroleum from there" to world markets.

Hojatolislam Hashemi-Rafsanjani, the Speaker of the Iranian parliament during the Iraq-Iran war, considered "such an eventuality unlikely." But he warned those Americans who doubted Iran's capability that Iran could effectively close the Strait by creating "a wall of fire" over it, firing its guns from Qeshm and Lark islands near the Strait, and launching air-to-sea missiles from planes, and from underground depots."

In other words, if Iran can't export its oil, it would retaliate by attempting to prevent all exports from passing through its front yard. In short, as Iran sees it, oil exports through the Strait should be safe for all, or safe for none.

"The danger of an escalating incident at the Strait has expanded exponentially in recent years. Iran's military capabilities have increased dramatically, rendering it more able than ever to close the Strait, if at all necessary. On the American side, the Bush administration has massively expanded the presence of American warships in the Persian Gulf, in the wake of war in Afghanistan and Iraq."

War-gamers will no doubt debate whether Iran can fully block oil traffic at the two mile wide navigable channel, if the gauntlet is laid down. And oil speculators will fantasize about how high oil prices will jump were such a test to be even tried. Sanity counsels we ought to endeavor to avoid tempting such fates.

"Whether or not the recent maneuvers of Iranian speed boats were timed to occur just before the anti-Iranian Bush visit to the Middle East, the fact remains that the risk of an "accidental war" has grown considerably. Bush's efforts to rally Sunni Arab states against Shia Iran meet with disbelief, as these countries recognize all too well that Bush's threat of "serious consequences" against Iran, if effected, will harm them and the international community as well."

So regardless of who provoked or escalated the recent incident, "The creation of a hot line between Washington and Tehran... will help prevent future incidents from turning into armed hostilities. " I gather there are senior players on both sides who wish to see such a hotline established. It seems to me that the only objections will come from those determined to see a hot war.

Beyond the immediate goal of preventing a war, Ramazani closes his essay by suggesting four additional benefits such a hot line could simulate:

"First, this can be a catalyst for a broader Incidents-at-Sea agreement between the two countries encompassing the entire Persian Gulf. During the Cold War, the U.S. signed an Incidents-at-Sea agreement with the Soviet Union to avoid accidental warfare by deepening the military-to-military communication between the various parties. The agreement was successful in minimizing the number of incidents between ships and aircraft of the two navies, thus reducing the danger of the inadvertent escalation of a minor incident at sea into something far more serious.
Second, it could aid the establishment of a collective regional security system in the Persian Gulf, including, I propose, neutral patrol boats under the flag of the United Nations."

(I've written several times, including here, about Ramazani's proposals for hybrid security arrangements for the Persian Gulf.)

"Third, it could help restore Iran-U.S. diplomatic relations in the long run. Contrary to widely held myths, Iran has never closed its door to diplomatic relations with the United States. Khomeini left the door ajar "if America behaves itself," that is, if the United States refrains from imposing its will on Iran. His successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, subscribes to the Khomeini line, saying that Iran's lack of contacts with the United States "does not mean that we will not have relations indefinitely."
Fourth, the increased hostilities between Iran and America redounds to the benefit of Iran's hawks. Conversely, the reduction of such animosity by any means, including a U.S.-Iran hot line, could help Iran's doves who want relations with the United States. More importantly, it could aid their struggle, in spite of all acts of repression, to advance democracy and human rights in Iran."
Posted by Scott Harrop at 01:05 PM | Comments (4)

Nasrullah taunts Israel over body parts

Hizbullah head Hassan Nasrullah's appearance before a massive crowd in south Beirut today had strong preliminary buzz to the effect that he was going to say something big. I think the new big thing was his claim that as a result of the 33-day war of summer 2006 Hizbullah holds the body parts of numerous fallen Israeli soldier:

(HaAretz agrees with this news judgment.)

Nasrullah told the mammoth crowd:

    we have heads of Israeli soldiers, we have hands, and feet; we have nearly whole bodies as well. So what did the army say to the families of those soldiers? They are so weak that they left the parts of numerous bodies-- not just one or two or three-- on the battlefield.
This claim may well gain some importance inside Israel-- and certainly in the years-long indirect negotiations between Israel and Hizbullah over the return to Israel of the mortal remains of Israeli pilot Ron Arad in return for the release of some remaining Lebanese (and perhaps also Palestinian) prisoners held by Israel for many years. Arad has been described as "missing in action" by the IDF since 1986.

The "exchange" negotiations, which are reportedly brokered-- whenever they occur-- by Germany, also now include the two live Israeli soldiers whose capture in July 2006 sparked the whole 33-day war.

In his speech, Nasrullah also said, "I don't judge that Israel right now can muster the political or military leadership to wage a war against us." That seems to be a good judgment. (Though I think he was also right to add the caveat that followed: "we must not be surprised for the future.") Israel's Winograd Commission is due to release its final report on the mishandling of Israel's 2006 war effort on January 30.

HaAretz is reporting continued discord among commission members over how harsh to be in the final text on PM Ehud Olmert. But whatever the text says or refrains from saying, it cannot say anything good about Olmert's leadership during the war.

Israel's political-military leadership is still weak today. Partly as a result of the continuing fall-out from the 33-day war; partly because of its inability to resolve the continuing fighting with Gaza, or to stop the Gaza Palestinians from continuing to send their (primitive, but often scary and occasionally lethal) home-made rockets into southern Israel; and partly because of continuing internal discord over the "peace process" with the PA, which has already caused the rightwing Yisrael Beitenu party to flee the governing coalition.

Personally, while I think Israel's leadership is beset by many internal weaknesses, I don't wholly draw the conclusion that that means Olmert is on the point of changing his policy and becoming a generous-hearted, visionary peacenik... I believe it is very possible that a weak government, feeling itself beleaguered on many sides-- and now openly taunted by the turbanned Sayyed from Beirut!-- might lash out somewhere, perhaps somewhere quite unexpected. But that wouldn't solve any of Olmert's and Israel's problems. Indeed, it would most likely only make them worse.

Another couple of points about today's big Ashoura gathering in Beirut.

AP reminds us that this was the first time Nasrallah has been seen at a big pubic gathering since September 2006. He has very evidently been on an Israeli hit list for many years. His first predecessor as head of Hizbullah was assassinated by Israel before Nasrallah became head of the party in 1991-92., and many times over the years, especially since the 33-day war of 2006, Israeli leaders have announced their desire to target him. So today's appearance was, on its own, an event worthy of some degree of buzz in Lebanon.

Another aspect is, of course, the sheer size of the crowd-- as well as the discipline and forethought that went into planning the whole event. I have no way of gauging the size of the crowd, though it was clearly far more than the "tens of thousands" mentioned by AP. So they were certainly in the hundreds of thousands. Did they total more than the numbers of participants in those two massive street rallies of 2005: the (anti-Syrian) March 14 rally and the (largely pro-Syrian) rally of April 2005? Ot perhaps even more relevant at this point: the big anti-Siniora rally of December 2006. We'll have to wait for the most scientific form of counting possible. (Though of course, the tally will certainly be an issue of intense political contention.)

But these matters of numbers are important. The pro-Siniora forces in Lebanon call themselves "the majority." They do currently have a majority in Lebanon's notably gerrymandered parliament. But Hizbullah and the rest of the opposition contest the claim that the Siniora government represents a majority of the Lebanese people. And the pro-Siniora forces have never held anything like a mass public rally at which their popular support could be demonstrated.

The country is due to have new parliamentary elections in 2009. The voting system on which those elections will be based will evidently be crucial; and there is supposed to be a new electoral law introduced before then to reform the archaic and sectarian system used until now. That electoral reform is one of the three issues currently being discussed in the "package" of Lebanese issues being negotiated by Amr Moussa and several other parties. The other two being the make-up of the new government and the identity of the new President. This latter issue has been resolved, for now. But Michel Suleiman will not be taking up his presidency until the other two issues are also resolved.

The noted expert and author on Hizbullah Amal Saad-Ghorayeb was one of several analysts quoted in The Daily Star here today as saying that actually, maybe Hizbullah and the pro-Siniora ("March 14") forces would actually prefer for the government crisis not to get resolved right now, but to leave the presidency empty until the elections of 2009.

This concurs with the gut judgment I made when I was here last week, based partly on the impressions I'd gained and blogged about, to the effect that despite having no president and having this continuing constitutional crisis, the country seemed remarkably not poised on the brink of an explosion.

So the Arab League head Amr Moussa continues with his shuttling around the region and his attempt to find an "Arab" solution to the Lebanese crisis. Saad-Ghorayeb was notably unimpressed when we talked earlier today. "President Mubarak said that if the Lebanese could not agree among themselves then he would 'wash his hands' of the Lebanese problem," she said. "When my friends and I heard about that, we fell about laughing. What on earth has the Egyptian government ever done for Lebanon?"

I digress. Let's wait and see what further fallout today's rally and Nasrallah's revelation about the body parts will have.

    Update noon-time Sunday, Beirut time: Thanks to the well-informed friend who urged corrections/clarification to a couple of the facts referred to above, which I made. Also, I just talked with a colleague close to Hizbullah who said the estimated crowd size was probably 850,000-900,000-- though hard to gauge, given the side-streets etc. The CIA's July 2007 estimate of Lebanon's population is 3.9 million.

Posted by Helena Cobban at 07:37 AM | Comments (29)

Live-(t.v.)-blogging Hizbullah's Ashoura


The following is a continuation of my record from watching Hizbullah's Al-Manar t.v. here in my hotel room in Beirut.  It'ds a contiunuation from this earlier record, which provides more background on the occasion. Lebanon's time is two hours ahead of GMT; seven hours ahead of the timing used in our records here at JWN.

11:35.  Split-screen view of Ashoura in Kerbala and and Beirut; later, Baalbek and Beirut.

The speaker talks about Khomeini and readiness for the long confrontations ahead

11:40  Okay, finally-- Here is Nasrallah at the podium.. In contrast to the preceding speaker, whose voice was harsh and shrill, he starts off in a low, reassuring voice.  He has the distinctive inability to say his "r"s.  He grips the podium and appears quite calm.

He says that now, as in Hssein's day, the choice is between "continuation or humiliation." (Al-silla aw al-zilla.)  The one presenting us with this choice today is, he says, mainly George Bush who showed on his recent visit to the region that he wants to keep the racist Zionist settler entity in place and strong and occupying our holy places there and oppressing and besieging our Palestinian brothers; who wants to keep the occupation going in Iraq for decades including the occupation of our holy places; who  threatens Iran and Syria; who sent the Israeli planes against all of Lebanon in 2006.

(Please note that my rendering of all this is necessarily very flawed because I'm watching it on t.v., listening to the sound-track, translating it in my head and writing this down in as near real-time as I can.)

Talked about the attack of the Zionist airplanes in 2006... and with all the help they had from the whole world they didn't succeed, after a battle of 33 days they didn't succeed in wiping out our resistance..

The following is my rough rendering of the rest of the speech:

Now, after the visit of Bush the ummah (Islamic nation) needs to resist all his schemes.

Secondly, we need to resist all attempts to confiscate our holy places

We need to undertsand who is our enemy,  Bush is trying to persuade our leaders and peoples that Iran is the enemy but it is not.  It is our neighbor and our supporter.

Bush announced continued war against our brothers in Gaza and against the Palestinian people in general.  Even while Bush was in the region the Zionist planes were attacking Gaza and killing the people there and escalating the siege that tries to impose hunger and death on the people.

We say to the Arabs we don't ask anything from you.  We in Lebanon don't ask anything from you because we are resisting.  What we ask is that you lift the siege on Gaza.  If the siege continues, without you Arabs doing anything to lift it then you will be revealed to everyone as corrupt.  The whole ummah is called to take serious steps.

Thirdly, about Lebanon.  Raising the question of our citizens who were kidnapped by Israel.  If this happens to even one Israel, the Security Council meets and makes a big fuss, but this happens so frequently to our people being kidnapped by Israel...

I don't judge that Israel right now can muster the political or military leadership to wage a war against us; but we must not  be surprised for the future so we must continue the resistance.

We do not want war but we reject that anyone wages war on our country.

Fourthly, we say that that Israel is acting as it is because it is weak, as was shown particularly in the war of July.  So I say to the Zionists: your army lies to you.   They say they never leave the bodies or body parts of your soldiers on the battlefield ... but we have heads of Israeli soldiers, we have hands, and feet; we have nearly whole bodies as well.  So what did the army say to the families of those soldiers?  They are so weak that they left the parts of numerous bodies-- not just one or two or three-- on the battlefield.

He talks about Aml founder Musa Sadr some.

Fifth, at the Lebanese level... He mocks/criticizes the Arab League intervention a bit.

Showing who is the "majority" and the "minority"...

The Arab intervention has been working night and day to liquidate the resistance in this country.

We shall continue our efforts to negotiate a resolution to this problem in spite of their attempts to "internationalize" the Lebanese question and their threats to do so.

They have tried every year to impose a liquidationist settlement on us from inside the country.  2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and now 2008.  But they never succeeded.

Haihat minna al-zilla.  (popular shouts.)

Starts to talk about the price of bread and the "electricity discrimination"...  We are not behind people's hunger or unemployment or oppression...  The solution to this is the formation of a truly representative government linked to the people not one linked to private interests and private banks.

Our negotiator seeks justice and rights.  And we won't leave Lebanon to the American project.

Every Ashoura we stand here and recommit oursleves to justice and to struggle for sake of justice  We stress our  resistance here in Lebanon, and our commitment to resistance in Palestine, and in Iraq.

Even if they destroy our houses we will stay with you, Hussein. (Shouts from the crowd.)  Even if they kill our children and our women and our old people and our men, as they did for 33 days during the war of July, we will stay with you....

12:25, he's coming to an end.  He ends up greeting "the most noble of people, the most dignified of people... "  The broadcast stops fairly abruptly.

Posted by Helena Cobban at 05:48 AM | Comments (1)

Waiting for Nasrullah on Ashoura


I'm sitting here at 10:50 a.m. in Beirut watching Hizbullah's t.v. station, al-Manar, as it airs the big processions taking place in the southern suburbs to mark Ashoura, the anniversary of the killing of Hussein Ibn Ali in the Battle of Kerbala (in present Iraq) in A.D. 680.  The broad streets are completely crammed with black-clad figures, men and women, some waving high yellow, black, or red flags.  Some wear the broad yellow scarves of Hizbullah, some wear green scarves.  Broad chants rise from sections of the crowd, among them: "I follow you, Hussein!... I follow you Hizbullah!"  A few minutes ago, some organized cohorts of men  were rhythmically striking themselves.

10:55.  Now the crowds seem to have come to a large open space.  The camera zooms in to a portion of it where there some commotion and with a grainy long-distance lens we see Sayeed Hassan Nasraullah in the middle of the crowd with his bodyguards trying to clear a space in front of him...  I imagine the Israelis are watching this too.  Suddenly the loudspeaker shouts "I foolow you Nasrullah!" The crowd repeats it ecstatically.  The speaker then plays his voice, recorded, greeting people and shouting the slogan of Ashoura: "Haihat min al-zilla" (translated by Amal Saad-Ghorayeb as "Humiliation is unthinkable.")

Death to America. Death to Israel.

The crowd, claimed to number a million, is being guided from nearby streets into the square.

Last night I watched a Manar broadcast of Nasrullah giving a fairly lengthy oration in a vast enclosed space.  It was a lengthy religious/political allegory talking about why Hussein entered the battle of Kerbala even though he knew death was a possibility.  But his burning desire for justice pushed him on. Nasrullah recounted the story in an expert mixture of sonorous classical Arabic fus-ha and whenever he was representing what people (including Hussein) actually said, he would render this in Lebanese demotic and his whole body language would change to more that of a traditional, fatherly storyteller. (You can actually see a good example of this rhetorical style of his-- with English subtitles-- on this months-old YouTube clip.)

The "lesson" he gave in last night's speech was that Hussein was not seeking martyrdom and nor was he seeking to grab control of the regime; but he was simply taking determined action based on his strong desire for justice, and the outcome was in God's hand.  (A fairly Buddhistic lesson, if I might say; certainly one with broad human relevance.)  In talking with Amal S-G this morning she said the main lesson there seemed to be against those who urge pursuit of martyrdom operations for their own sake.  Or, as she said, an anti-salafi message.

In the crowd now, families, women in cohorts. Women with and without headscarves, but most with.  Men carrying small children.

Now the crowd has parted to provide an eight-foot clear walkway, with stewards holding the crowd back on each side.  Now coming down this walkway a small group of people, including many men in green scarves...

11:15.  Well, I guess the Israelis may have been watching and even targeting the cleared walkway but now, suddenly, there he is still in the middle of the crowd, smiling and waving.  Unclear from the images exactly where in the crowd he is.

Loud shouted chants with call and response.  Sung chants in which from time to time the crowd joins.  Mixing "I follow you, Hussein!" with "I follow you, Nasrullah!"

Notes about this.  An apparently new level of personalization here: more Nasrullah than Hizbullah.  An assertiveness about being Shiite.  Understandable, of course, since this is a religious holiday for the Shiites.  But the whole holiday from its origins to this manifestation of it has an unmistakeable anti-Sunni cast to it?

11:20  Oh, here from one side-street comes a procession pulling along a disabled Israeli tank.

Big shouts for Hussein.  Then Death to America; death to Israel.

Different crowds-- some organized into cohorts, some just ambling along-- are still coming along different side-streets.

The camera shows us a large group of turbanned imams.

When I talked with Amal Saad-Ghorayeb an hour ago, she noted that the Hizb has invested a lot in today's event/spectacle including from the media point of view.  Ive just been thinking about the camera work involved in all this.  They have large numbers of cameras mounted on, presumably, high buildings around the area.  Sometimes we have four different split-screen views but there are certainly more cameras than that.  Hizbullah has always, as I've noted before, been good at circuses as well as bread (and military shrewdness.)

11:30. Preparations still underway, including centrally the getting-into-position of people who are still gathering from along the side-streets. The voice on the speaker seems to be getting into a more somber mood.

11:35.  His arrival is announced.  But we still don't see him.  Someone else is doing a chanted song.


Posted by Helena Cobban at 04:36 AM | Comments (15)

January 18, 2008

Nir Rosen on the Nahr al-Bared events, etc

Just ten days or so ago I was sitting with Nir in the lobby of the Gefinor Rotana Hotel in Beirut-- and here is the piece he was crashing on finishing at that point.

It is a great and detailed piece of reporting on the whole phenomenon of the emergence, after the Syrians' 2005 withdrawal from Lebanon, of Sunni salafist extremist groups in some Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and some other parts of Lebanon, too. That phenomenon came to a crescendo with last summer's fighting in the Nahr al-Bared camp in the north of the country.

Nir has some fascinating new details about the involvement of Hariri-owned banks in helping the salafists-- who held a number of different nationalities-- bring into the country the huge amounts of dosh they apparently had at their disposal while they were here.

This is an important piece of reporting. Nir should perhaps have spelled out that Bernard Rougier, whom he quotes, is probably the world's greatest expert on the question of militant Islamism in Lebanon's long horrendously oppressed and besieged refugee camps. Here is a link to the recent English version of Rougier's book on the topic, Everyday Jihad.

I would add a couple more comments here:

    1. The rise of extremist groups within Lebanon after the Syrians' departure has many intriguing analogies to what happened here after Ariel Sharon's shock troops succeeded in chasing the PLO forces out of West Beirut in summer 1982. It was after that point that the whole of the (non-Syrian-controlled) part of the country became a safe haven for all kinds of new extremist groups.

    Between 1976 and 1982, western embassies in Beirut had solid agreements with the PLO's security forces to provide protection for their diplomats and nationals. In 1978, when my then-employers at the Sunday Times felt that my life was under threat because of the recent killing of my colleague David Holden, they contacted the British Embassy (since I was a British national), who arranged with Abu Ja'afar in the PLO's security force to provide me with a 24-hour bodyguard. Actually, the ST wanted me to leave Beirut, but I couldn't because I was 8.7 months pregnant. So the bodyguards came with me to the maternity hospital. Joy, rapture. (Irony alert.) That was 30 years ago this February. That was just one tiny example of what all the western embassies were doing in those days. (I should write here about my former neighbor Abu Hassan Salameh some time; his role in negotiating those agreements, his relations with the CIA, and the CIA's unwillingness to shield him from the Israeli assassination operation that ended his life. There's gratitude for you...)

    After the PLO's departure in 1982, there was no body able to provide security to western diplomats and nationals. That's when Malcolm Kerr got killed; when numerous westerners were taken hostage; and when western embassies started getting blown up.

    I won't say Lebanon is quite in that state of anarchy yet. But the analogy of booting a stabilization force out of this country and then finding there's no-one capable of providing day-to-day security is an unsettling one.

    2. The Palestinian refugees trapped in their dismal hovels in Lebanon got the short end of the stick in the whole "Fateh al-Islam" story as recounted by Nir.... just as they've gotten the short end of the stick-- from the Israelis, from many Lebanese, from others-- throughout much of their whole tragic history here in Lebanon. I'd like to note, since I've just returned to Lebanon from Syria, that the situation of the Palestinian refugees in Syria is exponentially better than that of the Palestinian refugees here. There, they have the same social and economic rights as any Syrian citizen, and many have risen to the top of their professions. Here, there is still a list of 74 professions from which Palestinians are proscribed; they can't own real estate; they can't even expand their own cramped shelters without getting approval from the authorities (rarely given); and many of them have direly curtailed freedom of movement.

    There was something in the Daily Star recently about some 5,000 "unregistered" Palestinians here now being offered registration. I'm note sure how much good that will do them.

    If the Palestinian "state" being discussed by Abu Mazen and Co is to have any value or meaning at all, it should surely be a state that can (a) provide safe haven for beleaguered Palestinians here and everywhere else, and (b) intercede with other governments on an equal basis to ensure that the rights of its nationals are not abused.

    Statelessness-- that is, being in the situation of being not just a refugee but a refugee without any recognized nationality or citizenship-- is a very vulnerable situation to be in. Ask the Palestinians in Lebanon...

But first of all, go read Nir's informative, if depressing, story.

Posted by Helena Cobban at 09:31 AM | Comments (1)

Beirut, briefly

I'm in Beirut, briefly and very busily. Tomrrow is Ashura here. Interesting. I have a lot of work to catch up with here, then return to Damascus Sunday for a short return visit.

Just in case any of you out there cared.

Posted by Helena Cobban at 07:31 AM | Comments (4)

January 16, 2008

Text of interview with Bushra Kanafani


Interview with Ms. Bushra Kanafani, Director of the Foreign Media Department at the Syrian Minister of Foreign Affairs


Conducted for Just World News by Helena Cobban, Jan. 15, 2008.


Q:  I'd like to ask your views about the recent Annapolis conference.  What persuaded Syria to take part, and how do you view the outcome?

A:  The question of Golan is a national priority for us as Syrians-- the people and the government.  It is wrong for any international conference on the Arab-Israeli issue to ignore Golan.  Golan needs to be on the agenda.  That was why we went.  We agreed that the Palestinian question could have priority.  But at least Golan should be on the agenda, even if it is not given equal prominence.

Right now, we are not sure about the status of the Syrian-Israeli track in the negotiations.  We still see no sign of willingness from Israel or the United States-- at this point-- to resume the Syrian track of negotiations.

Q:  How about the position of the other members of the 'Quartet'?

A: The Russians have talked about holding a follow-on international conference in Moscow, but they have announced no decision yet-- perhaps because there are still so many difficulties.

The US administration is stressing the Palestinian track for their own internal reasons.

If there is a Moscow conference, its content is still unknown.  So far we have no reason to think there will be such a conference.  If there is one, we would go-- for the same reason we went to Annapolis: to make sure that the Golan question is on the agenda.

Q:  Do you have any reason for new hope regarding achievements on the Palestinian track since Annapolis?

A: Unfortunately not.  There is nothing to indicate that there is any hope...

Actually, as we see it, the priority for Palestinians is not in these peace talks but to make a reconciliation among the Palestinians themselves.  There will be, as you know, a conference of Palestinians next week in Damascus and its aim is to rebuild Palestinian national unity.  Everyone has been invited.  Mr. Abbas has been invited.

Q:  Is this an attempt to return to the Mecca agreement among the Palestinian movements that the Saudis were able to mediate last February and to heal the inter-Palestinian rifts caused by the events in Gaza last June?

A:  You know, we all worked for the Mecca Agreement.  We don't want to say exactly who was responsible for breaking the Palestinian national unity that was achieved there, because we always keep the same distance between the different sides in internal Palestinian disputes.  Actually, regarding the Mecca Agreement, the Palestinian representatives started the talks here in Damascus but then moved to Mecca because Riyadh [that is, the Saudi government] could be better at marketing the agreement reached.  But the situation in Gaza after the conclusion of the agreement was not healthy at all, and that led to some bad developments...

Q:  How are your relations with Saudi Arabia these days?

A:  There are differences between us.  The Saudis put emphasis on the question of Lebanon and express concern about our relationship with Iran-- though they also have their own relationships with Iran, too.

Regarding Lebanon, after the Riyadh Summit conference of late March last year, which we went to, we suggested to the Saudis that we work together on the Lebanon issue.  We wanted each side to use its influence with its repsective allies there to resolve the political problems.  But the way it turned out, the Saudis wanted us to use our influence but we did not see so much the same from them.

Q:  And how are your relations with Iran.  Were there some problems with Tehran after you decided to go to Annapolis?

A:  We have had good relations with Iran since the revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini.  These are mainly because of our strategic view of the region.  Iran has been a friend to us since the days of Khomeini, and iut is an important regional power-- as Turkey is, too.

We appreciate the Iranians' stand, even though we don't agree with them about everything.  We don't agree with President Ahmadinejad's statement about Israel.  We declared many years ago that peace with Israel is our strategic choice; and it still is.

Q:  Was there a big problem with them when you decided to go to Annapolis?

A:  They didn't like it, and they said so.  But we do what we think is right for us.  In the diplomacy of the 1990s, for example, we had our talks with Israel for ten years.  Those talks didn't in the end achieve anything.  But our relations with Tehran remained fine throughout.

Q:  What is the main thing you want from the US Government?

A:  We want them not to be a 'closed-eyes' ally of Israel.  We can';t change the fact of the alliance.  But at least it should be an 'open-eyes' alliance that also recognizes the realities of this region.

In the negotiations of the 1990s we expected a US role as a neutral negotiator, but we didn't get it.

Q:  How do you hope to persuade the Americans to change their approach?

A:  Through dialogue.  Through talking.  This is the duty of the US administration and people, if they want to continue to pursue their interests in the long run.  Dialogue and talks are the only way.  We would certainly like them to return their ambassador here, to discuss all the many issues of shared concern between us-- but not for them to pick and choose which issues they want to discuss, as they currently try to do.

You know we have a joint committee with the Iraqi government on border security, and the US asked to participate in it.  We said, No.  Because we need to discuss Iraq as well as the peace process and Lebanon with them.  In Lebanon, we see them as fostering a 'winner-takes-all' mentality which is very harmful.

We have seen no sign of any improvement in bilateral relations since Annapolis.

Q:  How do you see the prospects for Lebanon?

A:  We hope Amr Moussa's mission can succeed.  We see some Arabs trying to change the Arab Plan that Moussa has produced, but in our view the whole Arab Plan should be a package deal.

You know, the US also has its friends in Lebanon, in the government and the March 14th movement.  It should try to influence them to accept the Arab Plan.  Until now we didn't hear any word of support or encouragement from the Americans for the Arab Plan.  From our side, though, we have been calling on all Lebanese and Arabs who care like us about Lebanon to support Amr Moussa's initiative.

This problem in Lebanon needs to be resolved, because the longer the constitutional crisis continues, the greater the danger of a crisis erupting.

Q:  What is your view of the suggestion from the Iraqi Defense Minister, as reported in  today's New York Times, that the US should keep its bases in Iraq until 2018?

A:  We are against all this!  The US invaded Iraq illegitimately, against the wishes of the international community.  Then, to add insult to injury, they brought Iraq into chaos, and they brought Al-Qaeda into Iraq where it had not previously existed.  And of course they also found no WMDs.  But what they brought into Iraq was what you might call a "bloody democracy."

What is best for America, Iraq, and the whole region is to have a timetable for US withdrawal from Iraq parallel to the process of rebuilding the Iraqi forces.

To have American bases there over the long term: this is a recipe for more violence.

Q:  How do you view the legitimacy of the present Iraqi government?

A:  Firstly, we note that this present government was the result of elections.  The democracy was "bloody", but still, there were elections.  That made it different from preceding governments in Iraq, because there had been a real political process there.

And secondly, we have mutual interests and concerns that we need to work on with this government.  There is security: we have many important security interests in common with them, not least because at one point we were being accused of allowing terrorists to travel to travel into Iraq.  But now through our joint work with them we have done a lot to address that problem.

And there are so many other common interests!  Water, for example.  Last week we had a three-party meeting here in Damascus between us and Iraq and Turkey to discuss water issues on the Tigris and Euphrates.  And there are other trade and economic issues.

Q:  How are your relations weith Turkey?  I have heard that the Israelis are uneasy about them.

A:  The Israelis want the Arabs to have nad relations with everybody!  Turkey is a neighboring country, and it does a good job, including as a channel between us and Israel.  The Israelis should value that.

Q: What can you tell me about the incident last september when Israeli planes attacked a site in northern Syria?  If the site was as innocent as Syria claimed, why didn't you organize delegations of diplomats and journalists to go and tour it?

A:   The whole affair is very mysterious and there is still a lot we don't know about it.  The Israeli media announced the attaack -- not the government.  And then our defense ministry  confirmed publicly that there had been an attack.  The Israeli government still said nothing.

The Israeli press gave various different accounts of what the target had been, and settled on the idea it had been a nuclear-related site, involving the North Koreans.

I should note, though, that we did show photos of the damage suffered to diplomats and press people.  The Israeli missiles hit an empty area.  We showed pictures of the Israeli missiles that had fallen.  Then people elsewhere showed pictures of a building that they claimed had been destroyed by Israel.  But who knows where that building was?

Maybe they made a mistake?  People should ask the Israelis why they did it.  So far they have kept silent about what it was all about.

Q:  How do you see the prospects for the months ahead, which will include the US election campaign?

A:  I can't link it to the election campaign, but the American administration has kept the tension high in the region for years.  Now, President Bush is trying to persuade the Gulf Arabs to confront Iran, and he is asking the Saudis to help with his peace process.  But it is not easy for the Saudis or any Arabs to support the plan when it ignores half of the Palestinians!

Bush wants to present himsel;f as a peacemaker.  But the pressures he is trying to exert on people don't lead to any hope of success.

Q:  How can we reinstate the role of the UN in the peace process?

A:  The Madrid conference did not give the UN a good role.  The sponsorship there was from the US and the Soviets.  So we should take a lesson from that.  When we were at the "Madrid + 15" conference in Madrid in October, many participants there believed the UN should play a bigger role.

Our view is that you can't have a peace process without an American role, because of the strength of the US-Israeli relationship.  But you also need to have a good influencing role for the UN.  Also, the Europeans should play a bigger role: one that involves not just giving money, but also, a political role.  Even while keeping a special role for the Americans.

Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:52 AM | Comments (3)

Safieh to step down

Afif Safieh, who has been an articulate and effective representative for the PLO/PA in Washington for the past 18 months, announced yesterday that he has asked Abu Mazen to relieve him of his duties.

In the announcement, Safieh says this is for health reasons. But even a quick reading of the announcement shows that there are probably many other reasons for his request to step down, as well. The full text is given below.

I'll note that Afif Safieh is himself a staunch son of Jerusalem, so the anguish he expresses over the plight of the Palestinian half of the city is probably very deep and very real.

In 1995, during the height of "Oslo fever" in the west, I traveled to Jerusalem and wrote a multi-part series for Al-Hayat on the tragic situation in the city. Prior to Oslo-- and all during the first intifada, 1987-93-- East Jerusalem had been a central node of Palestinian political activity. Intellectuals and activists based there could travel with remarkably few restrictions throughout the West Bank and throughout Israel, as well as into Gaza. Shortly after the conclusion of the Oslo Accords and the return of the PLO leadership to Palestine-- but to Ramallah, not to Jerusalem-- East Jeruslaem became surrounded by a ring of steel checkpoints as the Israelis worked to cut its 160,000 residents off from contact with the West Bank, and vice versa.

During those visits to Al- Quds in the 1990s, I often checked in with Afif's sister, Diana Safieh, who ran a travel agency on Salahuddin Street and was active in the leadership of the East Jerusalem YWCA. She and her friends there gave me many details of the effect the ring of steel-- and the continuous encroachment into East Jerusalem of Israeli settlements, large and small-- was having on their lives.

Since then, the ring of checkpoints has been replaced with the even more suffocating Separation Barrier, 30 feet high and punctuated with guard towers, which cuts neighbor from neighbor throughout the Palestinian part of the city and looms like a concentration camp wall over many Palestinian neighborhoods. I can certainly understand where the angst that Safieh expresses about the city comes from. Back in 1995, I heard many similar expressions of anguish from Faisal al-Husseini (God rest his soul) about the degree to which the PLO/PA leadership had neglected Jerusalem's Palestinians during their pursuit of the chimeric "peace process" of those days.

Here is Safieh's announcement:

    PLO Mission, Washington, DC

    January 15, 2008

    Subject: Static Diplomacy

    From: PLO Mission - Washington, DC

    Afif Safieh, the Head of the PLO Mission, has returned to Washington from Palestine. While in Ramallah, Safieh attended the meetings with visiting President Bush / met with President Abbas/ with Prime Minister Salam Fayyad/ attended the meetings of the Fatah Council which discussed the situation in Gaza and the preparations for the Fatah Conference before Summer 2008/ visited Bili'in where a heroic protracted non-violent struggle is waged against settlement-building and land-confiscation and met with the entire leadership of the village/ attended the exquisite Daniel Barenboim piano concert in Ramallah where the size of audience again demonstrated Palestinian thirst for a life of normality or the semblance of normality...etc.

    Safieh deplored what he called "Static Diplomacy" in spite of the thousands of hours that are invested in talk about talks, negotiating pre- negotiations and pre- negotiating negotiations. On the ground the situation continues to deteriorate: the inhuman siege of the Gaza Strip and the daily bombardments, the frequent and repeated Israeli military incursions in the urban centers of the West Bank, settlement expansion mainly in and around occupied East Jerusalem and the number of the check-points that was not reduced strangulating the society and suffocating the economy.

    Safieh was distressed by the conditions in East Jerusalem, the future Capital of Palestine, a city politically orphaned by the death of the Faisal Husseni and the illegal closure of The Orient House. Safieh in a meeting with 12 personalities from Jerusalem took a commitment to constantly raise the issue of the necessary reopening of The Orient House as stipulated in the first phase of the Road Map.

    During his stay in Ramallah, Afif Safieh has asked President Abbas to relieve him, soon, during 2008, of his duties in Washington for health reasons. Safieh has suffered in 2006-2007 of a herniated disc and has undergone surgery last May.

Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:39 AM | Comments (3)

Syria's policy, post-Annapolis


The director of the Syrian Foreign Ministry's Foreign Press Department yesterday expressed disappointment with the outcome of the Arab-Israeli peace conference held in Annapolis, Maryland, in late November. Syria had sent its deputy foreign minister, Faisal Mikdad, to participate in the conference.  But the Foreign Press department head, Ms. Bushra Kanafani, told me in an exclusive interview yesterday that she was not sure where the process launched at Annapolis was now headed. 

Ms. Kanafani expressed pessimism that the Palestinian-Israeli negotiating track that was re-launched there was headed for success. "As we see it" she said, "the priority for Palestinians is not in these peace talks but to make a reconciliation among the Palestinians themselves."

At the time of Annapolis, Syria had scrapped plans to host a "summit conference" involving Hamas and many other anti-Fateh Palestinian movements.  That conference has now been rescheduled for January 23-25.  Ms. Kanafani was at pains to point out, though, that "its aim is to rebuild Palestinian national unity...  Mr. Abbas has been invited."

Regarding the Syrian-Israeli track, she expressed no expectation that anything would be happening in it any time soon.  A follow-up session that the Russians-- who are members of the US-led "Quartet", along with the UN and the EU-- had considered holding in Moscow in mid-January has not eventualized, and there are no other current prospects for any activity on the Syrian-Israeli track.

At the time of the Annapolis talks, government leaders and pro-government media in Tehran openly criticized the decision of the Syriuan government-- a long-time Tehran ally-- to participate.  Several analysts in the west meanwhile expressed the hope that including Syria in the Annapolis process could succeed in "flipping" Syria away from its relationship with Tehran.  But despite those  Iranian criticisms of Damascus in November, that seems not to have happened.  Ms. Kanafani noted in the interview that throughout the whole period in the 1990s when Syria was actively involved in peace negotiations with Israel, Damascus's ties with Iran were never broken, and she indicated she saw no reason for them to suffer now.

Ms. Kanafani also discussed some intriguing aspects of Syria's burgeoning security relationship with the US-installed Iraqi government.  She expressed Syria's hope that the Arab League's attempt to resolve Lebanon's lingering government crisis could soon be successful.  She discussed Syria's current views of its relationships with Turkey (good) and Saudi Arabia (not so good.)  She also expressed a view of the importance that Syria sees for the US role in the peace process that would be surprising to those Americans who consider Syria an implacable foe of US interests and influence in the Middle East.

Less than two miles away from Ms. Kanafani's office in the Foreign Ministry, hundreds of Iraqi refugees were lined up in a large, well-run reception facility the Syrian Red Crescent Society (SRCS) runs to process their claims for the food boxes and other support the SRCS has been giving to then regularly.  Large numbers of Iraqis-- perhaps more than one million-- have found refuge in Syria from the turmoil and sectarian killing that has plagued their homeland over the past three years. Syria has also hosted hundreds of thousands of refugees from Palestine for 60 years now, and in summer it 2006 hosted half a million refugees from Israel's assault on Lebanon.  The violence, instability, and suffering in these neighboring Arab countries feels very real indeed in Syria.

The text of Ms. Kanafani's interview will follow. It is now here.

Posted by Helena Cobban at 08:52 AM | Comments (1)

January 15, 2008

More on 'Filipino Monkey', need for hotline

The reporters Andrew Scutro and David Brown-- writing for the Navy Times, no less-- delved into some of the questions I raised here about who in the Navy decided to super-impose a separate audio onto the video of the Iranian patrol boats that was released last Tuesday, and why.

Well, the "why" of it anyway. They quote Chief of Naval Operations (i.e. the US's highest-ranking naval officer) Adm. Gary Roughead as saying:

    “The reason there is audio superimposed over the video is it gives you a better idea of what is happening.”
However, he gave that answer in response to this question:
    When asked if U.S. officials considered whether the threats came from someone besides the Iranians when releasing the video and audio, Roughead said...
And that question never really did get answered...

But anyway, Roughead, like Bob Gates last week, was clearly supporting the decision to juxtapose the two separate tracks in the presentation released Tuesday.

Scutro & Brown's article contains lots of quotes from U.S. Navy officers who have served in the Gulf that illustrate just how wide-open and insecure the existing radio channels of communication are. They therefore also illustrate how urgent it is to establish a secure, dedicated hot-line between the militaries of, in particular, the US and Iran.

They officers quoted make many references to a frequent radio-channel user who openly calls himself "Filipino Monkey"-- which is, some of them say, a phrase used worldwide to denote someone who uses radio channels for unnecessary chatter. Scutro & Brown quote the spokeswoman for the 5th fleet in Bahrain as saying of the (threatening-sounding) audio transmissions used in the video compilation as released,

    “We don’t know for sure where they came from... It could have been a shore station.”
Anyway, good work, so far from the Navy Times, which is owned by Gannett, which is owned by McClatchy.

What would be even better would be if they-- and other key opninion-shapers in the US-- would start to agitate forcefully and openly for the establishment of hotlines and other robust deconfliction mechanisms in the Gulf. That need is still great, as evidence by the statement Israeli PM Olmert made yesterday, warning that even after his recent talks with Pres. Bush, "all options remain open" with regard to Iran's nuclear program.
That is quite clear diplomatese for saying Israel may well still go ahead and bomb Iran's nuclear installations or launch some other form of military attack against Iran.

Israel might do that itself, directly. Though Israeli planes would still need, at the very least, to have coordination with US military air-controllers if they want to reach Iran in one piece-- and even more so, to reach home safely again afterwards. And anyway, if Israel did inflict a significant military strike on Iran, no-one in Iran including the highest leaders would believe that Israel had done this without US connivance. More especially so after GWB himself said he personally doesn't really believe the December NIE.

Or, Israel might hope to have Iran attacked more effectively and more economically-- from their standpoint-- by sparking some form of provocation in the crowded waters of the Persian Gulf that, in the absence of secure communications between the US and Iranian navies, could rapidly jack-knife the whole region into the hell of an outright US-Iranian war.

Something that the professional militaries of neither country want. And neither do the great majority of the US (or Iranian) peoples.

Does George Bush understand the danger of these scenarios? Perhaps that is the scariest question of all to contemplate.

Posted by Helena Cobban at 02:14 AM | Comments (13)

January 14, 2008

Rhetorical high points of Bush's ME trip


The speech that George W. Bush gave in Abu Dhabi January 13 was important because it was the most authoritative articulation to date of  the content of what the president and his officials have described as their "freedom agenda" in the Middle East.  It goes quite a lot further than any previous presentation given by the President himself. in spelling out what the Bushites mean by their term "freedom agenda", which is currently the main narrative through which they interpret developments in the Middle East, and which they are also trying to promulgate among (or impose on) the peoles of the region themselves.

The Abu Dhabi speech is titled Fostering Freedom And Justice In The Middle East.  The version on the White House, linked to above, includes a couple of explanatory sentences at the top along with what appears to be the text that he actually delivered, and it is hard to see where the main text actually starts.  But here is how the first graf ends:

The President spoke about the great new era that is unfolding, founded on the equality of all people before God.  This new era offers hope for the millions across the Middle East who seek a future of peace, progress, and opportunity.  Unfortunately, these aspirations for liberty and justice are being threatened by extremists who murder the innocent in pursuit of power.

That, in a nutshell, is Bush's argument. Interesting to see his use of the phrase "liberty and justice" there, isn't it?  It is taken directly from the U.S. Constitution [update: oops! the US "Pledge of Allegiance", thanks Vadim!]-- and was a big theme of our conference there in Beirut last week.  But the phrase was abused in truly Orwellian fashion in Bush's speech. (And no, I don't think he was using it with any ironic intent.  I'm not sure the guy even knows what irony is.)

He then proceeds through the following topics, presented as subheads in the posted text:
  1.  Extremists Are Fomenting Instability In The Middle East
  2. The Desire For Freedom And Justice Is The Greatest Weapon In The Fight Against Violent Extremists
  3. America Is Using Its Influence To Foster Peace And Reconciliation In The Holy Land

Well, I largely agree with the first two of these arguments-- though I disagree strongly with Bush's identification of who the violent,  instability-fostering extremists are.

Personally, I would be inclined to argue that countries or leaders that (a) launch massive armed invasions of other countries without any even remotely credible casus belli and in defiance of the United Nations; (b) maintain oppressive and violent occupation regimes over the residents and resources of lands captured in war; (c) undertake massive and unjustified armed attacks against the people and infrastructure of neighboring countries with the aim of subverting their domestic political process; (d) pursue deliberate policies of coercion, divide-and-rule, and bellicose fearmongering at every level of their encounter with other nations, and (e) defy at every possible opportunity the United Nations and the international legitimacy that it represents-- these are countries that might justifiably be described as "violent", "instability-fostering", and "extremist."

Bush, however, identifies these two forces as the prime generators of  instability in the Middle East: (a)" the extremism supported and embodied by the regime in Tehran," and (b)" the extremism and violence embodied by al Qaeda and its affiliates".  Regarding Iran, he claims that,

Iran's actions threaten the security of nations everywhere, so the United States is strengthening our longstanding security commitments with our friends in the Gulf – and rallying friends around the world to confront this danger before it is too late.

It is significant, of course, that the Arab countries of the Gulf-- which should, under Bush's theory, be those who feel most threatened by Iran's actions-- have stepped up the level of their friendly  interactions with Iran in recent months.  If they see Iran as posing a "danger" to themselves, which they might do, then it seems clear they have chosen not to "confront" it in the bellicose way that George Bush urges, but rather, to try to reduce the danger through persuasion and bridge-building, instead.

In general, a pretty effective way of reducing dangers in any inter-human encounters, I believe. And for the Gulf Arab states, it certainly seems to be working well.

In Bush's consideration of democratization, he says:

Leaders across the Middle East are beginning to respond to the desires of their people and taking steps that will help enhance the stability and prosperity of their nations.

... That is, steps toward the introduction of some of the mechanisms-- if not necessarily the institutions-- of democracy.. But what "steps" does he then cite?  The Palestinians' landmark legislative elections of January 2006, perhaps?  The seriously flawed national elections held by the US-supported regime in Egypt?  Um, no...  Instead, he mentioned
  • The United Arab Emirates' first-ever indirect (!) election for 20 Federal National Council members (out of how many?  I forget.)
  • Kuwaiti elections in which women were allowed to vote and hold office for the first time. 
  • Municipal elections in Saudi Arabia (still all male; and only to a proportion of the seats on the new municipal councils); competitive parliamentary elections in Jordan, Morocco, and Bahrain (all of which had some notable flaws); and multiparty Presidential elections in Yemen. 
So his love of democracy is definitely very partial-- and heavily politicized. As we can see, later on, when he gets back to talking about Iran again:

The President called on the regime in Tehran to heed the will of the Iranian people and make itself accountable to them.  The day will come when the people of Iran have a government that embraces liberty and justice, and Iran joins the community of free nations.  When that day comes, Iran will have no better friend than the United States.

He seems not to be aware that Iran does have regular, very consequential elections.  Though these elections are far from perfectly designed from a democratic-theory standpoint, still, they do impose on the country's leaders a far greater degree of accountability to the citizenry than is provided, for example, in any of the Arab countries of the Gulf.  So it seems strange that, speaking in Abu Dhabi, one of the main criticisms he expresses of Iran concerns the flaws in the nature of its democracy!

He also seems clearly to be spelling out that (under him) the US will be doing nothing to normalize its long-strained relations with Iran-- until "The day ... when the people of Iran have a government that embraces liberty and justice."

This is the extremist, highly ideological view of the nature of diplomacy espoused by Natan Shcharansky (and Elliott Abrams): that purportedly "democratic" countries should not do any "normal" business with countries ruled in different ways.  It is a recipe for continuing confrontation, continuing instability.

The Shcharansky Approach is also the one the Bush administration has adopted wholeheartedly with respect to the Palestinian issue.  Namely, that the Palestinians may "deserve" a state-- but they shouldn't get it until after they have created a whole set of (indirectly US-controlled) made-in-US national institutions.  This is, of course, a travesty of the whole tradition of "national liberation", not to mention national independence.  It is no more George Bush's business how the Palestinians rule themselves than it is Mahmoud Abbas's business how the US rules itself.

That UN "thing"

And here's a rhetorical highlight from another portion of the Bush trip: namely, the "Joint Press Availability" (i.e. press conference) that Bush and Abbas held in the Muqata in Ramallah, January 10.

Yes, that was the same event where Bush had a broad little chuckle about how trivial the whole problem of the Israeli checkpoints was for him...

Later, there came this exchange with a journalist:

Q Mr. President George Bush -- you launched war against Iraq after the Iraqi leadership refused to implement the United Nations resolutions. My question now is, what is the problem to ask Israel just to accept and to respect the United Nations resolutions relating to the Palestinian problem, which -- facilitating the achievement of ending the Israeli occupation to the Arab territories and facilitating also the solution between Palestinians and the Israelis?

And for Mahmoud Abbas, did you ask President George Bush to ask Israel to freeze settlements fully in order to enable negotiations from success?

PRESIDENT BUSH: Yes, but tell me the part about the U.N. thing again? What were you -- I couldn't understand you very well. {Why not?  Seems quite clear to me!]

Q I just asked why you ask Israel to accept the United Nations resolutions related to the Palestinian problem, just to facilitate the solution, and to end the occupation.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Actually, I'm asking Israel to negotiate in good faith with an elected leader of the Palestinian Territory to come up with a permanent solution that -- look, the U.N. deal didn't work in the past. And so now we're going to have an opportunity to redefine the future by having a state negotiated between an elected leader of the Palestinian people, as well as the Prime Minister of Israel. This is an opportunity to move forward. And the only way for -- the only way to defeat the terrorists in the long run is to offer an alternative vision that is more hopeful. And that's what we're attempting to do, sir.

We can stay stuck in the past, which will yield nothing good for the Palestinians, in my judgment. We can chart a hopeful future, and that's exactly what this process is intending to do; to redefine the future for the Palestinian citizens and the Israelis.

I'm confident that two democratic states living side by side in peace is in the interests not only of the Palestinians and the Israelis, but of the world. The question is whether or not the hard issues can be resolved and the vision emerges, so that the choice is clear amongst the Palestinians -- the choice being, do you want this state, or do you want the status quo? Do you want a future based upon a [made-in-the-US] democratic state, or do you want the same old stuff? And that's a choice that I'm confident that if the Palestinian people are given, they will choose peace.

And so that's what we're trying to do, sir.

So he considers the UN to be old hat. It is no longer relevant to his version of Israeli-Palestinian peace diplomacy.  Maybe someone should tell Ban Ki-Moon that?  And tell the other four permanent members of ther UN Security Council, too?  What role, I wonder%0
Posted by Helena Cobban at 03:12 PM | Comments (14)

January 13, 2008

Syria, Annapolis, and after



The winter weather is cold, bright, and beautiful here in Damascus.  On Thursday night there was a huge public firework display, launched from most of the length of the restaurant-studded road that runs along near the top of the massive mountain that shlters Damascus from the northwest, Jebel Kassioun.  The fireworks were celebrating the beginning of the year during which Damascus has been designated-- by the Arab League-- to be the "Arab Cultural Capital".

The diplomatic arena that the government here is trying to navigate is decidedly less sparkling. Back in late November President Bashar al-Asad made a last-minute decision that Syria (though not he personally) would participate in the Israeli-Arab "summit" meeting that President Bush convened in Annapolis.  That was not an easy decision, coming after many years of active US hostility to Syria and seven years of intentional US stonewalling on Syria's repeated requests for the resumption of Syrian-Israeli peace negotiations.  Indeed, on several occasions over recent years, when high-level figures in the Israeli government started discussing the possibility of resuming the negotiations on this track, those exploratory feelers were nipped smartly in the bud by the Bush administration-- particularly by Bush's NSC person running Middle East affairs, the notorious Elliott Abrams, and by people in VP Dick Cheney's office.

Syria's decision to go to Annapolis was also a tough one because it was strongly opposed by the Iranians, who have been key allies of Syria ever since the 1978 Islamic Revolution in Iran. And it was politically quite controversial at home in Syria, too, given the depth of anti-American feeling here.

But Asad made the decision to take part, in line with his (and before him, his father's) longheld diplomatic position of strong commitment to seeking a negotiated settlement to the 60-year state of war with Israel, including crucially Israel's complete withdrawal from the portions of sovereign Syria that it has occupied since 1967.


In the 1990s, Syria was a full participant in the Arab-Israeli peace conference that was convened by the US (and the Soviet Union-- remember them?) in Madrid, in late 1991.  And over the years that followed, as negotiations continued on the Israeli-Palestinian track and the Israeli-Jordanian track, so too they also continued on the Israel-Syria track, where by March of 1996 the two countries had come close to reaching a final peace agreement. 

At that point, though, Israeli PM Shimon Peres abruptly withdrew his team from the negotiations. Netanyahu, who succeeded Peres in mid-1996 and remained in office till 1999, kept the Syrian negotiating track nearly completely dead, with the continuing tacit support of the Clinton administration.  Negotiations were resumed briefly in 1999, after the arrival of Ehud Barak as Israel's new PM.  But Barak was disastrously hamfisted in his conduct of both domestic and foreign policy.  Regarding Syria, he tried to pull off a bit of last-minute sleight of hand by tempting Asad Senior to go to a summit with Clinton in Geneva, spring 2000, who then revealed only at the last minute that-- ha,ha!-- the Israelis were not, after all, prepared to withdraw from the whole of the occupied Golan, as had been promised within the context of a full-spectrum final peace package since 1994.

Asad Senior died shortly thereafter, and was replaced by his son, the present president.  Barak did not last much longer in power after the Geneva debacle, either, since the ineptness of his domestic policymaking led to the shredding of his governing coalition in almost record time even for Israel's notoriously fractious political system.  He was replaced by Sharon, and then came Olmert. (Barak is now back, as Olmert's notably hawkish Defense Minister. Peres is Israel's President, a largely symbolic post.)  It has been under Olmert, primarily, that ministers at various times have suggested re-opening the Syrian track.  But Elliott Abrams has quashed any such move.  He has reportedly argued that since everyone understands that since any final peace agreement with Syria will necessarily involve the return of the occupied Golan to Syria, then "Golan should not be returned to the Asad regime, which will see this as a huge benefit, but only to a fully democratic Syria."

International law of course says nothing about the internal governance mechanisms of participants in international diplomacy, seeing that as a matter of sovereignty for the countries themselves to determine. Parties to negotiations can voluntarily make undertakings in this realm, if they choose, which is what happened with the Helsinki Agreement of 1974. But to imagine that the character of a regime should be a precondition to any negotiations is ludicrous.  That would paralyze the whole venture of diplomacy,  including the ability to conclude such important agreements as the arms control agreements between the US and the Soviets during the Cold War, the agreement between Britain and China over the peaceful transfer of Hong Kong, etc, etc.

And since when did Elliott Abrams-- of all people!-- care about international law or the integrity or success of freely negotiated international agreements, anyway?

... So there we were, at the point when the present Pres. Asad made the  very sensible decision to have Syria participate  in last November's Arab-Israeli "peace" conference in Annapolis.  Syria's delegate there was Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mikdad.

At Madrid, Syria had been represented by the then Foreign Minister, Farouk Sharaa.  Was the decision to send only Mikdad this time a bit of a signal that Syria was not quite as deeply committed this time around?  I don't know.

But what does seem clearer is that the dominant forces in the Bush administration did not really want Syria to be there at all.

The Syrians had agreed to go to Annapolis after being assured by the Saudis, Egyptians, and others that the Golan issue would be fully on the agenda.  It was not.  Instead, they were "allowed" by their hosts to raise it at a sort of "open mic" session held after the main session at which the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations were fully discussed.

Unlike in Madrid, there was no attempt by the US hosts to prepare either the terms of Syria's participation at the conference, or any follow-up diplomacy.  Instead, all that US officials said at the time-- I think this was Condi-- was some thing like "We won't prevent the Syrians from raising any issue they want during the conference.  We won't be turning the microphones off."  To me, that seemed like an offhand or even downright disrespectful response to the Syrians' request that the Golan issue be fully on the agenda.

Nevertheless, the Syrians did go, and by some accounts they were pleased by some of the small diplomatic grace-notes they encountered while there.  For a couple of weeks afterwards, Syria's government seemed to some observers to be cautiously warming up to US representatives in the region, and in the same period Gen. David Petraeus and others made some cautiously appreciative comments about the contribution Syria was making to trying to stabilize the situation in Iraq.

But then something happened, and it interesting to speculate what this might be...  One possibility could, paradoxically enough, have been the December 3 publication by U.S. Director of National Intelligence Mike McConell of the very notable recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran that stated ":with high confidence" that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in fall 2003.

The publication of the NIE almost completely wiped away the ability of the Bush administration to launch a military strike against Iran on the pretext that this was necessary to abort an Iranian nuclear program.

For several months prior to December 3-- and also, though in a slightly different way, since then-- the Bushites had been assiduously preparing the diplomatic ground for an attack on Iran... Including by trying to build up an anti-Iranian "coalition" among the Sunni-dominated Arab countries.  At the time of the preparations for Annapolis, many US commentators argued it would be good to include Syria in the conference there, because this would peel Syria away from its longstanding alliance with Iran.  (Or "flip" Syria, as the rather childish saying in Washington went.)

But if suddenly there wasn't any realistic prospect of launching an attack on Iran, then why-- acording to the "flip Syria" thinking-- should Washington bother to make nice to Syria any more?

My view is that this could certainly have been part of the  reason for the re-emergence of some fairly hard-line rhetoric against Syria in the utterances of leading administration members including, as I recall, the President himself.

Another reason, not mutually exclusive from the first, may have been that, while Elliott Abrams and his allies maintained or stepped up their harsh opposition to any rapprochement with Asad's Syria after Annapolis, Condi seemingly did not want to challenge them on that.  She seems to have some degree of commitment to making (her unrealistic version of) the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations move forward.  But honestly I have seen not a single sign of any real interest from her or the President in making progress on the Syrian-Israeli track.  Including, in the design of the agenda at Annapolis...  And so, the Abrams steamroller just rolled right forward there..

(Well, there's a lot more to write from  Syria, but this is all I have time for now... More later... )

Posted by Helena Cobban at 01:08 PM | Comments (2)

January 12, 2008

More on today's "Tonkin" from Lobe

Jim Lobe suggests that the Pentagon's release last Tuesday of a fear-inducing report (backed up by audio and video) of Iranian patrol boats allegedly threatening US Navy ships in the Persian Gulf may have been part of a sophisticated ploy by the military (as opposed to civilian) leaders there to force the administration to conclude an "incidents at sea" agreement with the Iranian navy. Such an agreement would most likely include the kind of hot-line agreement I have been arguing for for a long time, but would probably also go further than that in defining procedures to de-escalate any tensions that may arise from the close operations of these two navies in the Gulf and in particular in their narrow entry channel, the strategically vital Straits of Hormuz.

I blogged here yesterday about the seriousness of the "scare video" incident, the need for urgent and full congressional investigations into who released the misleading video footage on Tuesday and why, and the need to prevent further unintended escalations through the establishment of a secure hotline between the two navies.

Lobe writes:

    I wonder whether this was the Pentagon’s equivalent of the intelligence community’s NIE on Iran’s nuclear program.

    ... [T]he timing of the Pentagon’s decision to publicize what really an apparently not-particularly-threatening incident involving Revolutionary Guard speedboats is particularly intriguing as I suspect there have been more serious incidents in the recent past. [HC comment: there have been.] Frustrated until now in their efforts to get the White House to authorize negotiations over a new agreement, could it be that [Centcom chief Adm William] Fallon (who worked very hard to improve military ties — sometimes over the objections of Donald Rumsfeld — with China as the commander of the Ninth Fleet), Cosgriff, and other Pentagon and Navy officials decided to dramatize the danger just as Bush was embarking on his trip, anticipating that the president would get an earful from his Gulf state hosts about their fears that a naval confrontation could quickly escalate into a real war in which they would suffer significant collateral damage?

An interesting hypothesis, to be sure. Also, if this was indeed the back-story, then the fact that Secdef Gates backed up the seriousness of the brass's warnings about this event could also mean he supports their campaign to win an "incidents at sea" agreement.

Lobe also very helpfully links to this September column by the always well-informed David Ignatius, who wrote:

    America's top military commanders in the Gulf favor an "incidents at sea" agreement with Iran that would reduce the danger of a confrontation... An unexpected opportunity for discussion occurred last weekend, when Central Command's naval chief, Vice Adm. Kevin Cosgriff, appeared on a panel with the brother of the commander of the Revolutionary Guard. This chance encounter at a Geneva meeting of the International Institute for Strategic Studies should be pursued.

    The United States and Iran are playing a game of "chicken" in the Middle East. A collision would be ruinous for both. Each side needs to be careful to avoid miscalculation and to act in ways that avert a crackup.

If the Lobe version of this incident is correct, then I would judge that issuing the very misleading, if not actually mendacious, "scare video" on Tuesday was still an extremely unwise and inflammatory thing for these guys-- or anyone else in the Pentagon-- to do. Not least because the US presidential campaign is now in full swing, and any hints that Iranian naval forces might be preparing a showdown with the massive US naval presence in the Gulf can clearly be expected to be demagogued to the hilt by the candidates-- especially those on the Republican side.

This McClatchy report (hat-tip Juan Cole) from a GOP debate in South Carolina gives us a taste of how the GOP hopefuls dealt with the issue. Only the admirable Ron Paul retained some sense of good sense and dignity. He referred directly to the Gulf of Tonkin incident and said, "I would certainly urge a lot more caution than I'm hearing here tonight." Candidate Mitt Romney then "cracked that Paul should stop reading Iranian propaganda." (Ho, ho, ho. Why am I not amused?)

Well, the crucial goal I see in all this is still the establishment of a much more robust deconfliction regime in the crowded naval arena of the Gulf. Certainly including a hot-line agreement but also, yes, a broader "incidents at sea" agreement would be good, too. I don't know how broad an agreement can be reached there in the absence of much broader political discussions between Washington and Tehran over the whole range of their current disagreements. But surely, at the very least, they could agree to establish a secure, dedicated channel of communication that is not subject to the same kind of external intrusion/intervention that their existing channels are.

As to the prospect of congressional investigations-- yes, I still think these would be excellent. But they should focus as much on the urgent need for a hotline and other deconfliction mechanisms going forward as on investigating the still very murky past history of the compiling, authorizing, and issuance of the scare video.

Posted by Helena Cobban at 03:40 AM | Comments (39)

January 11, 2008

Conference in Beirut; "justice"; cluster bombs

I was planning to do a series of blog posts from the big conference I went to early this week at the Al-Waleed bin Talal al-Saud Center for American Studies and Research (CASAR) at AUB, in Beirut. But I confess I got a bit busy doing a few other things-- some of them nitpicky editorial things to do with finishing the manuscript of my book, some having to do with actually spending some good time with some good people. So I postponed and postponed doing that blogging... And now, Stan Katz, the former head of the American Council of Learned Societies, who was also there, has beaten me to it and done a pretty good job of blogging the conference.

He did so in these three posts on the blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education: 1, 2, 3.

As Stan noted there, it was truly international gathering-- even if not yet sufficiently so. The 50 or so presenters included scholars from Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, occupied East Jerusalem, Turkey, Germany, the UK, Netherlands, France, along with roughly 25 from the US. The conference's title was "Liberty and Justice: America and the Middle East". It was certainly notable that it was taking place just days before His High Excellency President G.W. Bush launched on his imperial-scale tour of his Middle East outposts... Checking up, no doubt, on the state of "Liberty and Justice" in Israel, Palestine, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the other countries he's visiting. But that was a very different kind of "east-west" interaction!

One lack at the conference that I noted was the absence of any Iraqi scholars. Iraqis have, after all, been at the receiving end of most of the US's policy in the region over the past five years. What do they have to say on the conference's topic? I do not know whether the conference organizers had invited any, and they failed to attend; or whether none had ever been invited. The inviting process did seem a little haphazard in some ways. But one thing that was clear was the outreach and effort the organizers had undertaken in order to secure the participation of four or five scholars from Tehran. That was an excellent thing to do. I wish I'd spent more time trying to get to know the Iranian participants.

One of the sessions that Stan Katz attended, but I didn't, was on the challenge of teaching American studies in the Middle East. He wrote:

    The speakers included the head of a new MA program at Teheran University in Iran (who seems, from his utterly colloquial language, to be an American), the director of the program at the University of Jordan in Amman, and a young graduate student from Al Quds University in East Jerusalem... In each case, though, there seemed to be considerable student interest in studying America, which in the year 2008 is both surprising and encouraging.
I don't know why he finds this surprising? The US is the dominant power in this region, and members of subordinated or "challenger" nations always have an intense need to understand the inner workings of the big imperial power. It is often a matter of sheer survival to be able to do so. I have always found that any random group of non-Americans, anywhere in the world, knows a lot more about the internal workings of US politics and society than any random group of US citizens knows about the internal workings of any other society, including neighboring Canada or Mexico. It is not just a question of the near-saturation of the world's public media with US-made cultural products, though that is one factor. But even more concretely, it is dictated by the intense need that members of weaker nations have to be able to understand the imperial power so they can optimize their chances of surviving under its domination...

And then, I'm not sure that Stan or anyone should easily jump to the conclusion that the desire of Middle Easterners to study America is "encouraging", as such-- except inasmuch as it indicates that there exists a large desire to understand other people across even some extremely thorny political divides. But if, as presenter Scott Lucas said-- and I agree-- we should be trying to decenter America within the global discourse, then we should applaud efforts by Middle Easterners to study Chinese society, or Indian society, or the cultures of Latin America or Europe as being equally "encouraging." Perhaps, above all, we should consider the efforts of academics anywhere to look objectively at-- and do something about-- the situation of their own societies to be the most encouraging step of all?

From this perspective, I think maybe one of the biggest and most lasting outcomes the conferences might have been the participation in it of around two dozen US scholars. These were mainly not scholars of the Middle East, but scholars in one or another portion of "American studies". So by coming to Lebanon-- a country that throughout the past decades of US hegemony in the Middle East has been buffeted around by the political forces loosed on the region by that hegemony-- these American Americanists probably had a bigger chance to learn something about their (our) country's real role in the world than they would have from consuming thousands of hours of CNN or other parts of the MSM. They had the chance, in Beirut, to meet as colleagues with peers from Iran, Palestine, and other "exotic" and demonized countries. They had the chance to go and witness at first hand some of the effects that the US's strong support (and heavy mid-war military re-supply) of Israel's 2006 assault had on the people and country of Lebanon... What an excellent way for them to learn some more about America's role in the world.

"Liberty" and "justice", indeed.

I wish the conferences organizers had put the words in scare-quotes like that in the conference title? But I suppose the multiple ironies embedded within the title as it stood were plain enough to see.

Many of the American Americanists were interesting people. In his introductory remarks, CASAR director Patrick McGreevey did an effective job of underlining the ironies embedded in the "Liberty and Justice" title. Including, he reminded us of George W. Bush's fall 2001 vow that he would "bring Osama bin Laden to justice-- or bring justice to him," which always struck me as a classic example of the misuse of the discourse of (true) justice.

First of all, what kind of justice would it be, that we would seek to bring OBL to? Would it look anything like the form of (miscarriage of) justice to which Saddam Hussein was brought? A hastily convened, US-dominated kangaroo court, which issues a death sentence and then carries it out in an extremely inflammatory manner?

I'm reminded of the words of ANC leader Rejoyce Mabudhafasi when I asked her what she wished had been done to the authors and upholders of the apartheid system-- and she said something like, "We could never be the kind of people who do to them what they did to us, and nor would we want to be. So I think only the Almighty can decide what to do to 'bring justice' to them." I do feel that way about OBL-- though I am of course also strongly of the opinion that the man's capacity for doing harm and violence, which he retains to this day, urgently needs to be incapacitated, a goal that can be achieved in any number of ways...

And then, what sort of justice might it be, that we would seek to bring to OBL? I don't imagine that GWB was thinking of assembling a traveling courtroom and then parachuting the whole thing in, black robes and lawyers and lawbooks and all, once the US military had found OBL, wherever he might be by that point. I rather strongly suspect that the "justice" GWB was thinking of bringing to him instead was a targeted assassination-- such as the US and Israel have made something of a habit of carrying out against suspected adversaries over recent years.

But that is, it seems to me, a profound abuse of the whole concept of justice. And not one that we should just slyly wink at, or go along with.

... Anyway, I realize I'm getting off the topic a little here. I just want to say I really appreciated the opportunity to be at the conference. I met some really interesting people and heard some great discussions. It also felt really good to be able to re-connect a little with some of my friends in Beirut, though sadly I didn't have nearly enough time to re-connect with everyone I wanted to.

Oh, I did learn something very interesting indeed about the cluster bombs issue while I was there. This was from Timur Goksel, the wise and well-informed Turkish diplomat who was head of UNIFIL's info operations from 1978 through 2002 or so. He said that one explanation he had heard for the Israelis stunningly large scale of use of cluster bombs was that the bombs were out of date and needed to be disposed of. So since disposal of any kinds of bombs is a not-cheap and sometimes risky business, the relevant decisionmakers in the IDF had thought why not lob all of those out-of-date cluster bombs into Lebanon and force Lebanon and the UN pay the price?

And as we all know, the price in human lives and livelihoods lost, as well as in $$$, has been huge-- and it continues to be exacted to this day. I don't have the figures easily to hand, but this late 2006 report from Haaretz says that the battalion commander of an IDF rocket unit "stated that the IDF fired around 1,800 cluster bombs, containing over 1.2 million cluster bomblets. By 30 August, 2006-- just 16 days after the ceasefire went into effect-- UN clearance experts had found "100,000 unexploded cluster bomblets at 359 separate sites" in south Lebanon.

The "dud rate" of the bomblets was reported at the time to be extremely high, and I do recall that some reports also noted that many of the cluster bombs that had been fired into Lebanon had had a production date of "1974" on them... So yes, the idea that the IDF might need to dispose of them seems to make a lot of sense.

Also, a large proportion of the cluster bombs that were fired were fired in the very last days of the war-- during that strange and terrifying three-day period during after the terms of the ceasefire had already been agreed, but before it went into effect.

Posted by Helena Cobban at 03:55 PM | Comments (4)

"Tonkin"-type escalation averted in Persian Gulf? Hearings?

The agility of the Iranian government's information capabilities has protected the US from what could well be an attempt by some moles deep within the Pentagon to jerk our country into a broad and extremely damaging military conflagration with Iran. Now-- as during that the worryingly similar Gulf of Tonkin Incident in 1964-- the US Congress needs to react.

But this time Congress's reaction should be of a very different kind. It should swiftly launch a thorough-going investigation into who in the Pentagon was responsible for producing and authenticating the very harmful (and quite possible knowingly misleading) video of the recent Persian Gulf incident that the Pentagon disseminated last Tuesday.

And it should ensure that secure communications channels are established between the US and Iranian naval forces operating in the Gulf, to prevent unintended escalations between the two forces as they maneuver in the Gulf's tight confines.

Back in the 1964, US Pres. Lyndon Johnson claimed that Vietnamese naval ships had attacked US navy ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. A congressional resolution followed that gave permission for a considerable escalation of US military power against Vietnam. By the time the falsity of the original claims had been discovered, it was far, far too late.

This week, some officials somewhere in the US military chain of command-- it is unclear exactly where-- reported that on Sun., Jan. 6, Iranian patrol boats, operating off the coast of their own country there in the Persian Gulf, had been streaming towards US naval vessels operating there (thousands of miles away from the US), and that a voice on the commonly used CB-type radio channel through which the commanders of ships operating in the Gulf's tight confines communicate had warned: “I am coming to you. … You will explode after … minutes.”

On Tuesday, shortly before he left on his current tour of Mideast countries, Pres. G.W. Bush blamed Tehran for for having acted provocatively, as he prepared to take his warning that "Iran is a threat" in person, to Israel and the US's Arab allies.

Here's AFP from Washington, on Tuesday:

    "We viewed it as a provocative act. It is a dangerous situation and they should not have done it, pure and simple," Bush declared in his first public remarks on Sunday's incident in the Strait of Hormuz.

    Shortly after he spoke, the Pentagon released a video and audio tape that appeared to confirm its charge that Iranian speedboats swarmed three US warships in the Strait and radioed a threat to blow them up.

    "My message today to the Iranians is, they shouldn't have done what they did," he added. "I don't know what their thinking was, but I'm telling you what I think it was, I think it was a provocative act."

But now, reports are proliferating that that the Pentagon video may well have been doctored, or for other reasons may not have been what it seemed.

Mike Nizza has an excellent round-up of the affair, here.

One crucial piece of evidence in all this is a video that Iran's own PressTV media organization released, and posted on its website, which purported to be original video shot by an officer on one of the patrol boats. I'm not on a fast internet connection here so can't view it all. Nizza writes:

    The clip is a bit over 5 minutes long. The first few minutes are views of coalition warships shot from smaller boats (if you thought the motorboats seemed to be moving fast in the American video, wait until you see the bow waves on the warships). In the latter portion, we see an Iranian on the boat using a microphone handset to hail “coalition warship 73″ by radio, in fairly clear but accented English, and we hear responses in an American voice...
He also refers to an NYT paper-edition article by Nazila Fathi from Tehran, in which Fathi contributes her own significant remark about the Pentagon's video that
    The audio includes a heavily accented voice warning in English that the Navy warships would explode. However, the recording carries no ambient noise — the sounds of a motor, the sea or wind — that would be expected if the broadcast had been made from one of the five small boats that sped around the three-ship American convoy.
She also writes-- though this may have been reported by Thom Shanker from Washington-- that,
    Pentagon officials said they could not rule out that the broadcast might have come from shore, or from another ship nearby, although it might have come from one of the five fast boats with a high-quality radio system.
Sadly, those Pentagon officials remain unidentified. The "official" view from the Pentagon, including from Secdef Robert Gates, remains that the video their people had released on Tuesday was the real thing.

This section of that report was interesting:

    The Pentagon immediately dismissed the assertion that the [original] video, which shows Iranian speedboats maneuvering around and among the Navy warships, had been fabricated. Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said Iran’s “allegation is absurd, factually incorrect and reflects the lack of seriousness with which they take this serious incident.”

    Naval and Pentagon officials have said that the video and audio were recorded separately, then combined. On Wednesday, Pentagon officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak officially, said they were still trying to determine if the transmission came from the speedboats or elsewhere.

So many things are going on here!

The video and audio were "recorded separately"? Huh? And then, un-named Pentagon officials speaking on background say they're not sure if the threats as originally reported had even come from the people on the patrol boats, but may have come from elsewhere?

Nizza's blog post gives some useful background about how access to the CB channel in question, Ch.16, is extremely random, and what gets transmitted on it includes lots of very trivial, entertainment-style or name-calling noise. I'll note that I've been calling for a long time now for a secure, dedicated military-to-military hot-line between the US and Iranian naval commanders in the Gulf, which could certainly help avert the possibility of any malignant (or even just "jokingly" irresponsible) third party being able to jerk the two navies into the broad military conflagration that-- I still think-- neither of them wants.

I still believe that the US military high command, up to and including Centcom commander Adm. William Fallon, and probably also the overall military leader, Joint Chiers Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, is strongly opposed to any escalation against Iran, which would almost certainly push the already unsustainably overstretched US military into a quite un-"winnable" war with Iran. So I am really not sure why Secdef Gates, who has also gone on the record urging a risk-averse stance towards Iran, was so definitive in telling a press conference yesterday that, "I have no question whatsoever about the [original] report on this incident from the captains of the ships and also from the video itself."

We all, certainly, need to know what's been going on inside the Pentagon itself on this issue. Which office there was it, precisely, that was responsible for releasing the original video? If the audio and video on it were indeed recorded separately, who was responsible for combining them in the way they were combined? I'm thinking that if some "joker" somewhere did voice this threat into Channel 16, then someone combining that with some video footage from the theater would already have a potentially wide variety of video clips to choose from... So why choose this one?

Also, is the audio portion of that feed actually time-stamped to be synchronous with the video portion of it?

Also, if you are running a video camera to record this incident-- not unusually, since apparently both sides were already doing it-- then why not run the audio associated with that actual video feed?

Also, who in the chain of command signed off on the "authenticity" of the compiled audio/video and authorized its dissemination?

Also, more importantly, it looks as if there are some offices in the Pentagon that may well be complicit in an effort to jerk the US into a conflagration with Iran. Who are they? When will the Pentagon identify them for the US citizenry?

We urgently need congressional hearings into this whole incident, so we can be confident that there are not moles inside our own military who would jerk our country into a disastrous war. The whole incident needs to be investigated rapidly and completely-- and certainly not just within the Pentagon itself.

As a final note, I just want to underline the hugely increased role that "information engagement" plays in today's military encounters or proto-encounters. The fact that the Iranians had recorded, and have been able to disseminate, their own video version of this same encounter changes things completely from the version Bush proclaimed on Tuesday. (And I don't recall that back on Tuesday or Wednesday anyone was questioning the authenticity or integrity of that original Pentagon video. It was only after the Iranians started challenging it and distributed their own video record of the incident that questions started arising about the US version?)

This equalization of the international "information battlefield" between the stronger powers and the weaker powers in the world is a phenomenon that is deeply transforming the nature of warfare in the present age.

In Lebanon in 2006, Hizbullah was able to (a) safeguard the integrity of its own communications and means of near real-time dissemination of information, while also (b) hacking in some instances into the IDF's communications. Those capabilities were an important component of Hizbullah's survival through that long and punishing war, and therefore of their victory in it. (Even though they were weakened in several important respects by it, Israel's strategic position was weakened even more.)

So this week, we have not had a Gulf of Tonkin incident. Thank God!!! What we should have, though, is another kind of congressional follow-up to this alarming incident: a formal enquiry into the whole story about the provenance and dissemination of the Penatgon's Tuesday video. And legislation mandating the creation of a secure hot-line between the US and Iran.

Posted by Helena Cobban at 06:33 AM | Comments (7)

January 08, 2008

Calm in Lebanon?

Lebanon does not have a president, and has only a caretaker government. The deadlock over how the next ruling coalition (president plus PM plus cabinet) is to be composed continues... There have been a couple of incidents in the south of the country-- one in which a UN peacekeeping patrol was targeted, and one in which a couple of Katyushas were fired over the border into Israel... Many parts of the broader Middle East are tense because of President Bush's imminent visit to the region and the near-clash between US and Iranian naval forces yesterday in the Persian Gulf. Normally, any such regional tensions could be expected to lead to a rise in tensions inside Lebanon.

But here's the thing: the little part of Ras Beirut where I've been staying since Friday seems remarkably calm and free of tensions or fears of imminent escalations of violence. And so, as far as I can see, do the major Lebanese media.

I'd expected that talk about the political crisis here and the fears of descent into renewed civil strife might dominate the conversations of Lebanese friends and colleagues. They really haven't. People seem, in general, to be sullenly habituated to the idea that the present uneasy status quo might continue for quite a while. It's not that things are great here; everyone seems to recognize that. But there is not the degree of fear, and of concomitant political and physical mobilizations for fighting that I thought I might find.

I guess the big confrontations among internal forces came in 2005: the big Hariri memorial march of March 14; and then the equally big pro-Hizbullah and FPM march of the month that followed. Since then there has been, basically, a stand-off between these two huge blocs within the Lebanese body politic. The M14 people won some gains, of course, with the Syrian withdrawal and other developments at that time. But the Hizbullah-led bloc made some gains with the political outcome of the 33-day war in mid-2006. Neither of those shifts was decisive.

In December '06, Hizbullah and FPM launched their big "sit-in around the Serail" to try to force the M14's PM, Fuad Suiniora, out of office. But that didn't work-- and neither were the government forces able to end the sit-in by force and open up the Hariri-created New Downtown for (Saudi shopping-led) "business as usual." So the stalemate between the two sides became routinized. The large forests of the protesters' tents still stand in many open areas of the downtown-- but they are largely empty.

Not having a president or a government continues the routinization of the stalemate. The atmosphere, in general, seems to be, "It's not wonderful, but we can live with it. And it sure is better than doing anything that could risk another war."

I'd like to note the wisdom and maturity with which all those legitimately involved in internal Lebanese politics have worked to prevent any resumption of (or slide into) outright civil war over the past three years. Of course the country hasn't been violence-free in these years: there have been 14 or is it 15 ghastly car-bomb attacks against pro-M14 figures; between them, these have killed scores of people. There was also the really inhumane fighting in and around the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp over this summer, which was provoked by salafi jihadists who had congregated there from many parts of the Muslim world. They were then answered with a massive use of force on the part of the Lebanese army, accompanied by many horrendous atrocities against the residents of the camp...

Once again, the poor Palestinian civilians there, who have no protection against either the implantation of the salafists or the depradations of the Lebanese Army, were showing that being stateless in today's world is to exist in a situation of extreme vulnerability.Once again, they were the punching bags of Lebanese political forces who sought to use violence against them for their own political ends. (In this case, the anti-Palestinian battles served to unite Lebanese from many factions around Army Commander Michel Suleiman, as the next President... The streets here are now plastered with posters hailing him as "The saviour.")

So it is not that there is no political violence here. There is. But still, it feels very different from I was here when the country was poised on a knife-edge, in April 1975.

I am willing to admit I could be completely wrong! I have only been here four days, much of it doing things other than doing reportorial investigations. Maybe somewhere just out of my current (necessarily constricted) line of sight, some political forces or small dedicated networks are working hard to produce some kind of massive crisis that could embroil the whole country-- and maybe, a large enough proportion of Lebanese would become jolted by that into resuming their civil war. But somehow, things just don't feel that way...

Posted by Helena Cobban at 11:38 AM | Comments (4)

Bush; Middle East trip; Nixon

Our justifiably beleaguered president, G.W. Bush has been describing how he sees his "legacy" to the world in a breathtaking series of interviews with Hebrew-language and Arabic-language media. The WaPo's Dan Froomkin has provided a helpful digest of these interviews, here. You can read the whole texts as posted on the White House website, on the sidebar here.

From Froomkin:

    "I can predict that the historians will say that George W. Bush recognized the threats of the 21st century, clearly defined them, and had great faith in the capacity of liberty to transform hopelessness to hope, and laid the foundation for peace by making some awfully difficult decisions," Bush told Yonit Levi of Israel's Channel 2 News...
And so it goes on. And on and on and on...

Froomkin, quite accurately, describes Bush's utterances as "particularly delusional as he heads to a region that remains traumatized, angry and distrustful on account of Bush's disastrous war in Iraq, his antagonism of Iran and his perceived crusade against Islam." He also notes that

    Bush's self-image contrasts sharply with his image among his fellow Americans... [A] CNN poll in November found that 58 percent of Americans rated Bush either a poor president, a very poor president, or the worst president ever.
So why is this sad sack of a guy being foisted onto the peoples of the Middle East at this time? I guess a first explanation might be simply that he is delusional. He really does not see the effect he has had on the world. (If you read the longer texts of these interviews, though, you'll see that he repeatedly argues that "we can't really judge the Bush presidency today, or for a very long time into the future...." Which means he probably is aware, if not of the effects of his actions on others, then at least of his low popularity figures.)

Another strong possible sign of his delusionality might be the degree to which he speaks about himself in these interviews in the third person.

From reading Froomkin I also learned of this recent WaPo op-ed in which the venerable former Senator George McGovern argued for Bush's impeachment. McGovern noted that back in 1974, when calls to impeach Pres. Nixon were gathering steam, he had stood aside from that campaign, because he thought if he joined it that would look like an act of political vengeance against the man who had beaten him in the 1972 presidential election.

But then comes this zinger:

    [T]he case for impeaching Bush and Cheney is far stronger than was the case against Nixon and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew after the 1972 election. The nation would be much more secure and productive under a Nixon presidency than with Bush. Indeed, has any administration in our national history been so damaging as the Bush-Cheney era?
He notes correctly that neither party in the Congress seems eager to start impeacghment hearings. But he writes:
    Bush and Cheney are clearly guilty of numerous impeachable offenses. They have repeatedly violated the Constitution. They have transgressed national and international law. They have lied to the American people time after time. Their conduct and their barbaric policies have reduced our beloved country to a historic low in the eyes of people around the world. These are truly "high crimes and misdemeanors," to use the constitutional standard.
I I drew a different comparison here yesterday between late-Nixon and late-Bush, noting that Bush's desperate attempt to get out of Washington and foist himself on the Middle East looked strangely evocative of the foreign trips Nixon made during his last months in office in 1974. One of those Nixon trips was indeed also to the Middle East. Someone who knows a lot about that era recalled to me recently that one of the strangest things that happened was when, during a meeting with the whole Israeli cabinet, someone raised the question of what to do about terrorism. Nixon replied that he knew what should be done! He jumped to his feet, assumed the crouch of a Chicago gangster and whirled his imaginary machine-gun around in front of him in a way that, if the gun had existed, would have mowed down the whole Israeli cabinet. "That's what should be done!" he told the astonished cabinet members.

I wonder if GWB's particular form of delusionality also involves amateur theatrics?

Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:59 AM | Comments (2)

January 07, 2008

Bush in Middle East: Region underwhelmed/ aghast

President Bush's determination to leave Washington tomorrow for a week-long overseas trip looks strangely evocative of Nixon's disaster-plagued last year in office. The lucky hosts of Bush on his out-of-DC wanderings will be Israel (twice), Palestine (very briefly), Kuwait, Bahrain, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.

McClatchy's Warren Strobel notes accurately that

    Bush, who once had grand ambitions to transform the Middle East through democratic reform, is to begin his first extended presidential visit to the region Tuesday with his sights lowered and his ability to influence events fading fast.
I would say that's already a under-statement. In fact, I've been wondering how the decisionmaking on planning this trip was undertaken. Did the leaders of all these countries transmit warm and hearty invitations to the US President that he couldn't turn down?

Or, did Washington propose these visits, and the Arab rulers involved found they had no way to squirm out of their duties as US satraps in the region?

Somehow, I doubt if it was the former train of events that occurred... Regarding Palestine, Xinhua has this interesting little round-up of the reactions of the various movements to Bush's visit. The reporter there quotes high-level Fateh legislator Abdullah Abdullah as being decidedly lukewarm about the visit-- while the Hamas and Islamic Jihad spokespeople are, quite predictably, scathing in the extreme.

Only Israel's Ehud Olmert-- who is still eager to distract attention from the imminent publication of the (most likely politically problematic) second part of the Winograd Report-- can be expected to be warm toward the idea of hosting this particular guest. For all the other hosting leaders, Bush's presence will most likely be viewed as something between a political embarrassment and the cause of a decidedly unwelcome additional security threat to themselves. Al-Qaeda has, after all, openly called on its supporters in the Muslim world to meet Bush's visit with "bombs and booby-trapped vehicles."

Not quite what the domestically unpopular and already hard-pressed rulers in Egypt and Jordan need at this time...

Regarding the political embarrassment for all these leaders, of having these visits serve to remind their citizens yet again of the these regimes' close ties with George Bush's Washington, the best way to gauge this will be to look for the amount and quality of media coverage that the government-influenced media in these countries give to Bush visit. My prediction is that most of them will try to cut such coverage down to a bare minimum. But let's see...

Posted by Helena Cobban at 09:21 AM | Comments (12)

Watching Hizbullah TV

Another benefit of being here in Lebanon is being able to watch Hizbullah's TV station, al-Manar. I have only watched a little of it on this trip-- certainly, nothing like a "representative sample" of their programing. (Oh, I just saw on the crawl at the bottom there just now that Israel's Winograd Commission has announced it will delay publication of the weighty second portion of its report into the failings of the 33-day war until January 30. Could that possibly be, um, a slightly politicized decision?)

Anyway, I did want to blog about a fascinating children's program I saw on the channel on Friday afternoon. I'd been working rather hard for some hours by then, doing some close editing/revision work on my Re-engage book, and by late afternoon I just wanted a break. So I was flipping channels on the t.v. in the hotel room and came to Manar, in the middle of a kid's program called, I think, "Bayt al-Boyout." ("House of many homes"). The very able main presenter was a young-ish woman dressed in hijab in different shades of blue, who was sitting in a set like a beautiful big children's playroom-- with a sign-language interpreter sitting beside her. The presenter (I never did catch her name) was conducting a conversation with a group of some four or five cute-looking kids of around 5-7 years old, all of whom were either blind, severely visually impaired, or deaf; and the presenter was conducting normal kindergarten-type activities with them, including reading then a story and asking them questions.

What was excellent about this program in my view was the light but intentionally educational way in which the presenter showed viewers that these are full, normal, human children who happen to be differently abled. When she conversed with the two deaf kids, she did so "through" the sign-language interpreter. There was even a little cartouche in the bottom-left of the screen where the signer's work was constantly on display for viewers with hearing disabilities.

I'm not sure I've ever seen anything on kids-with-disabilities in many hours of watching children's programing in the US that was as well done as this. (But that was a long time ago, I guess.) Also, this program was thankfully not interrupted by any ads-- for gross sugary drinks or foods, or anything else.

Toward the end, the presenter developed one of the topics mentioned in the children's book she had just read to the kids, and asked two or three of the children if they had ever argued with their younger siblings. The kids she asked said "Yes," and said the arguments had been over toys or the t.v. "And what did you do?" she asked. Both the kids said, "I hit my little brother [or sister}." The presenter continued by asking: "And then what happened? Did that solve the problem?" Each kid in turn said No, that the little sib just became peskier yet... So then the presenter said that it would be probably be more productive for the kids to talk about their disagreements/ concerns/ complaints to the sibling, rather than hitting them, and in that way they could work out how to take turns with the toy in question or the t.v. program, and still stay good friends with them.

Doesn't this seem like a good lesson for any children's show, anywahere, to leave with its viewers?

Isn't it interesting that the kids' show produced by Hizbullah is promulgating this message?

Now, Hizbullah's political leadership has never publicly expressed any desire to solve its problems with Israel through discussion rather than force. But-- and this is a big caveat-- it has always been eager to be included in indirect negotiations with Israel and other parties over the terms for a ceasefire in the hostilities between them; and once ceasefires have been agreed, it has generally stuck to their terms quite carefully. Its observance of previously agreed ceasefires-- in 1993, 1996, and 2006-- has not been total. But its infractions have been considerably less serious and numerous than those of Israel.

And meantime, the US-- and Israel-- both steadfastly stick to and repeatedly proclaim their political stance of refusing to sit down and deal with their grievances against Hizbullah through discussions rather than through force. (Though, as we have seen, when they have found themselves in an impossibly tight corner they have been prepared, in practice, to sit down and negotiate an indirect ceasefire with them.)

So maybe the political leaderships on all these sides would benefit from sitting down-- separately, if they prefer this-- to watch this educational episode of "Bayt al-Boyout", so they can learn some lessons about how talking through differences is better than simply lashing out with violence and intimidation against the other party?

But it occurs to me that Israel and the US are both physically far, far stronger than Hizbullah, and both have used violence on a far grander scale than anything Hizbullah has ever used. So perhaps they both need to learn the program's lesson about not hitting your younger siblings even more than anyone else?

Posted by Helena Cobban at 08:46 AM | Comments (6)

Laila and Nur; Rami

So I see Laila el-Haddad has announced her baby's birth now. She has fabulous pics there of adorable little Nur (= "Light"... very Quaker!) alone, and of Nur with her Dad, her proud big brother, and with the ever-beautiful Laila herself.

As the first commenter on that post there says, "May she grow up in a free and peaceful Palestine!"

As Laila says there, she did indeed take her laptop to the hospital with her, and on Wednesday or so she and I had a great little IM session in which she told me all about the speedy delivery. (I had earlier told her about the very speedy delivery of my second child, name of Leila, in Beirut back in 1979, so we recalled that conversation, too.)

And talking of fun interactions with fellow-bloggers... since I'm here in Lebanon I took the opportunity to meet Rami Zuraik, author of Land and People. Meeting Rami was every bit as rewarding as I had hoped. Turns out we have huge numbers of concerns and many friends in common.

We talked a bit about the US elections. He said that he felt US influence over the whole world is so great that people everywhere are strongly affected by the US political process. True enough. So he said he felt, actually, like a completely unenfranchized citizen of the US. (Correct me if I phrased that poorly, Rami.) I told him about the theory I've expounded here a number of times in recent years, to the effect that the relationship between the US citizenry and the world's 6-billion-p-lus non-Americans is analogous to the apartheid-era relationship between the South African "Whites" and the country's completely unenfranchized majority...

Also, it turn out I was wrong when I wrote about Rami's blog here, back in November, when I said he is Palestinian. He is indeed, as (yet another) Leila noted there, Lebanese, and married to a Palestinian.

We talked about a huge number of really important and interesting things, though only scratching the surface of all there was to say. In response to Vadim, who commented here yesterday that I have burned up a huge amount of carbon to get here to Lebanon, I would say that a conversation like the one I had with Rami Zuraik, or others that I've had while here, are quite impossible to have in a non-physical encounter-- though my experience is that once I've met someone in person, that establishes a level of mutual understanding from which it's possible to continue to have great communications through electronic media.

Also, without getting defensive here, I should note that from Lebanon I'll be traveling-- overland-- to Syria for a week; and I hope the combined results of all these meetings in both countries make my CO2 emissions more justifiable?

Posted by Helena Cobban at 07:50 AM | Comments (1)

January 05, 2008

I'm in Lebanon; thoughts on Obama, etc

We traveled to Lebanon on Thursday/Friday. Learned in Frankfurt airport about Barack Obama's big victory in Iowa. Great news!! Got to Beirut and discovered my bag hadn't. So I'm sitting here in one of Bill's shirts waiting for the bag, which Lufthansa promises will turn up this afternoon.

Once again, dealing with this seven-hour time difference gives me just a tiny taste of how disorienting any sleep deprivation can be. It therefore seems clear that prolonged and systematically applied s.d. regimes, such as U.S. operatives have practised against detainees in the colonial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and against detainees in Guantanamo and elsewhere, can cause severe damage to a person's sense of her/himself and thereby considerably corrode the independent human personality... And that is, after all, the aim of all torture.

(I am NOT claiming that the slight disorientation I have suffered is at all commensurate with the mental incapacitation suffered by the US government's detainees. Of course, it is a known risk, that I have voluntarily and knowingly assumed. And it is already almost past. But experiencing it is a good reminder of the reality and gravity of the much bigger problem.)

But back to Obama-- a much happier thought. I have already read a lot of commentary about his victory. One of the main points I've noted is that the engrossing contest within the Democratic primary process in Iowa succeeded in bringing out huge numbers of new participants in the complicated process of the party's caucus system.

That is great news-- including, that it is a great portent for the general election that will take place November 4. Getting a strong turnout in the polls November 4 will be key to a democratic victory. And it is, of course, an excellent portent for the health of US democracy looking into the future, too.

Turnout for the Democratic caucuses in Iowa was 239,000. Perhaps this was the greatest number ever? I'm not sure. But anyway, it was far, far higher than most people's expectations. It's a high figure, too, if you remember that people had to commit to turning out on a very cold night and to spending several hours participating in the whole caucusing system. Much more complicated than simply casting a single primary ballot, which is all the Iowa Republicans had to do... And for them, the turnout rate was, I think, less than 100,000.

Another item I picked up was that Obama did better than Hillary among all groups of women in the state, except for women over 65. That's interesting, because Hillary has tried to position herself as very much the choice for women. In Iowa, there is only a tiny sliver of African-American population, so if we take a "demographic-likeness" view of voting, then Obama had little "natural" base for his campaign there. What he proved instead was his ability to transcend many different kinds of demographic boundaries.

What does Obama represent, for me? I still have the excitement for him that I had when I went to see him in person at the end of October. I realize he is not everything I would like to a candidate to be. I wish he could speak more constructively on the Palestinian issue, the need for a complete withdrawal from Iraq, and the need for a universal health-care system. But after eight years of harsh Bush partisanship I like Obama's willingness to try to transcend a position of strict partisanship. I really like that he is not just a re-tread of disappointing times past, as Hillary is. I like that his youthfulness could draw more Americans into active participation in the political system. I like his "difference" from the same-old-same-old that has stifled American politics for so long.

I have to say that I also really dislike Hillary trying to "claim" all of Bill Clinton's experience and record as President as somehow also accruing to her "experience account" while also presenting herself as a person of independent accomplishment... And also her convenient omission of the fact that the one thing her husband did explicitly-- if not entirely constitutionally-- entrust to her care during his presidency, namely an overhaul of the health-care system, turned out to be a disastrous failure and a setback to the campaign for decent health-care; and the cause of that failure was in large part her gross mismanagement of the reform project.

So Obama's victory in Iowa looks really exciting to me. I hope he can take some good momentum forward to the next primaries, in New Hampshire and South Carolina. (S.C. will be a good test of whether he can attract some solid support from white folk in the south and not just in demure, well-meaning Iowa.)

By the way, the main thing I came to Lebanon for is this conference at AUB. Then, I'm going to Syria.


Posted by Helena Cobban at 04:09 AM | Comments (24)

Note on "caucus systems", Iowa and Iraq

The complex system of party caucuses used by the Democratic party in Iowa is very similar to the system that US overlord L. Paul Bremer proposed introducing in Iraq, back in 2004-2005. Ayatollah Ali Sistani strongly opposed that, and succeeded through street demonstrations etc in persuading Bremer to have the nationwide "party list" system that the US authorities eventually used for the successive elections there, 2005 and 2006, instead.

At the time, I strongly supported Sistani's argument that the caucus system seemed complex, non-transparent, and very vulnerable to manipulation by the occupying power. The election system advocated by Sistani did not, in the end, generate a national government that did very much-- if anything at all-- of value to the country's citizens. But the reasons for that lay not in the system of elections, but in many other political factors...

But perhaps I was wrong to judge at that time that, in the absence of credible promise from the US occupiers that they would refrain from intervening in Iraq's political system, any system of elections could have been expected to generate a national governing body capable of both providing decent basic services to the Iraqi people and defending their interests against all intrusions including those of the occupying power?

At the time, though, I judged that the strength of the popular movement that Sistani seemed capable of mobilizing would continue to be able to defend the integrity of any national leadership generated through the election system. I was wrong in that judgment. For reasons that i don't fully understand (though I should have paid more attention to this possibility), Sistani withdrew from playing any direct active role in Iraqi politics once he had made his big "point" about the election system... And in the absence of his playing any role, it was the smaller, much more partisan-minded parties that took the initiative in the Shiite community, with the generally catastrophic results that we have seen over the two years since the January 2006 election.

So in the end, did the choice of which electoral system to use make much difference? Perhaps not...

Posted by Helena Cobban at 03:49 AM | Comments (2)

January 03, 2008

Kenya: violence, nonviolence, moral authority

I've been watching the news of this week's violence in Kenya with huge concern. Many of the news reports speak of horrors similar to those experienced in eruptions of mass inter-group violence anywhere in the world. Particularly terrifying: the reports of people who were previously good neighbors and close personal friends to each other suddenly becoming polarized into violence and hatred along the lines of some supposedly "essential" difference. This kind of sudden, hate-filled fanaticism can overtake any communities, our own included.

How to guard against it? By continuously teaching and re-teaching the value of all human lives, and trying to live out that commitment; by calming fears; by using all the moral authority anyone can muster in order to call for nonviolence, de-escalation, and the peaceable resolution of outstanding conflicts.

I have noted, regarding the present post-election violence in Kenya, that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon was much, much faster off the mark-- by a matter of days-- than anyone in the Bush administration in exercising the kind of moral leadership that Kenya's citizens and parties so sorely need to hear.

Yesterday, Condi Rice did finally get around to issuing a statement-- jointly with UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband-- that included a call for a cessation of violence and noted that there had been "independent reports of serious irregularities in the counting process" in the country's recent elections.

However, that statement came an agonizing five days after Rice, in the immediate aftermath of the heavily disputed December 27 election, had rushed to congratulate former President Mwai Kibaki on his electoral "victory." That, even as election monitors from the EU and possibly also from US-based organizations were raising enormous doubts about the integrity of the election.

Rice's moral authority was considerably compromised by that. (Of course, the administration for which she works also bears the burden of having grabbed the election of 2000 by some very questionable means.)

How wonderful, therefore, that yesterday, presidential candidate Barack Obama-- the son of a Kenyan father and an American mother-- issued his own call for a peaceful resolution of the controversies that divide Kenyans. (Other Democratic candidates hurried to follow suit.)

Meanwhile, this AP report says that the State department is now steadfastly refusing to reiterate its earlier endorsements of Kibaki's claimed victory.

I should note here that Kenya also has the largest group of Quakers any country in the world. I imagine they are also adding their weight to the calls for de-escalation, dialogue, and trust restoration in the country. (If anyone can find any news about the peacebuilding activities of Quakers or other faith groups in Kenya, do please tell us about that on the comments board here. Thanks!)

Posted by Helena Cobban at 01:29 PM | Comments (10)

January 02, 2008

CO2 emissions from saudi Arabia, other Gulf oil exporters

As an addendum to the post I just put up about Al-Hayat's writings on climate change and CO2 emissions, here is Nationmaster's ranking of the world's countries by per-head CO2 emissions.

It only goes through 2003, though I think the date should be available through 2005 by now. Still, look where Saudi Arabia is: # 19, with CO2 emissions in 2003 of 13.0 metric tons per head.

The US was # 10 there, at 19.8 metric tons/head-- but definitely ways ahead of any other major industrialized country.

Look at the fact that other Persian Gulf oil-producing nations occupied four out of the top five slots there. The world-average figure for per-head emissions in 2005 was 4.2 metric tons/head. If the world's biosphere is to be saved/stabilized, we all need to work extremely hard and creatively to bring the world average down to around 1 metric ton/head.

Posted by Helena Cobban at 12:29 PM | Comments (5)

Al-Hayat's Morkos on the global economy, inequality, and the environment

I have long thought that al-Hayat's English-language web presence is one the saddest wasted opportunities in the whole global discourse. However, recently I discovered some very thoughtful writing in an unexpected portion of the site: it is on their business pages.

Going there today, I found two generally very intelligent pieces written by their Business Editor, Michel Morkos: Inequality and Environment Challenge the World Economy, published December 18; and The Price of Environmental Change in the Economic Formula, published December 31.

The first of these pieces identifies a recent significant reduction in the dependence of the world economy on the US economy, and explores the implications of this de-coupling (which Morkos judges, imho correctly, is by no means complete.)

He writes:

    For the first time, the growth of the world economy is allowed to be separated from the US economy. This is considered a good step because it shows that the world is less liable to comply with the US demand and debt. It wasn't logical, or fair, that most countries, especially underdeveloped countries, should totally yield to the economic fate of the richest economy worldwide and the most spendthrift on the planet.

    This separation of the US and world economies will pave the way for the countries of the world to witness a better distribution of the growth returns...

Towards the end of this piece, Morkos moves towards considering equality issues in the global economy, an issue on which he expresses justifiable concern. Then he has a short consideration of the impact of environmentally motivated changes on the prospects for growth, and here he seems to buy into the distinctly questionable argument that environmental constraints will necessarily hamper economic growth.

In the second of these pieces, however, Morkos delves with more intelligence into the economic and other effects of global climate change, and does a much better job of considering its impact. He cites obert Costanza's 1997 attempt to put a dollar figure on the value of the contribution that the world's biosphere itself makes to the global economy. He cites the IMF's and the ICRC's noticeably differing estimates for the numbers of "environmental refugees" worldwide (25 million, vs. 500 million), but concludes rightly that this is a phenomenon deserving of our great attention... Then he cites what I think was the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report of 2007 on the accelerating degradation of the biosphere-- though the double translation involved has this body referred to there as the "group of intergovernmental experts on climate" rather than the "intergovernmental panel on climate change." And then he moves on to the Stern Review of late 2006 on the economic consequences of climate change, and Stern's estimates of the economic costs of either fixing or not fixing the problem.

Still referring to Stern, he concludes his piece thus:

    The planet is facing the risks of a "major disruption to economic and social activity, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and economic depression of the first half of the 20th century." However, the planet can be saved by reducing gas emissions that cause global warming and seeing the earth avoid even worse consequence; the cost won't be more than 1% of the annual world GDP.

    Can we preserve a clean planet and a good economic environment?

Not a bad place at all to launch his next column from!

In fact, if urgent measures are not taken to preserve the biosphere on which all of humanity depends, the world's economy, society, and perhaps all of human life itself will anyway be going into a tailspin within the next 100 years, as Stern clearly indicated... And meanwhile, the experiences of farsighted entrepreneurs in many countries, especially Germany, have already shown that a coordinated shift towards the use of ever-greener technology can be good for both the economy and the environment. The idea that this is a zero-sum game and that there always has to be a tradeoff between the two interests is just plain false.

Anyway, I've been happy to draw attention to Morkos's writings on this issue for a couple of reasons. It has been good to find the business editor of a major international daily newspaper starting to grapple seriously-- even if, imho, still somewhat imperfectly-- with the whole climate change issue.

And then: look at who publishes and reads Al-Hayat! It is published by weighty, ruling-family-related interests in Saudi Arabia, and it is read very widely by well-connected persons in the Kingdom and other Gulf oil-producing states. How excellent to get these circles starting to think seriously about climate change, and by implication about the role their own countries can play in starting to deal with this issue.

In the first of his december articles, Morkos writes,

    Only Saudi Arabia launched a fund at the beginning of this month to protect the environment and impede the dissemination of gazes that cause heating. But the conflict is ongoing about the methods...
I don't actually think that statement as written (which may have been a mis-translation from the Arabic original?) is correct. Many other countries and intergovernmental bodies have launched funds aimed at helping to support pro-green economic transformations. Though of course, all these efforts are still horrendously under-funded; and the World Bank and many other major development-funding bodies continue to pour huge amounts of money into building infrastructure systems around the world that are heavily gasoline-dependent.

And Saudi Arabia's own rate of per-capita greenhouse gas emissions is horrendously high, and definitely needs to be considerably reduced. Al-Hayat's business editor should turn his attention to that huge challenge, too.

But all in all, I was pleased to find those two pieces on the English-language Hayat website. The site's Business section also carries some interesting writings by the veteran oil-affairs expert Walid Khadduri.

But in general, Hayat's English-language website still remains a wasteland of missed (or shirked) opportunity. It carries very little material at all; and the choice of which of the paper's Arabic-language articles do get translated and published on it seems almost completely random. There is no RSS feed or use of hyperlinks. Its Search function has never worked for me. The organization of the site, such as it is, is abysmal.

Posted by Helena Cobban at 12:11 PM | Comments (1)

January 01, 2008

My article on the post-9/11 world in 'Friends Journal'

Earlier this year I had a strong leading, as we Quakers say, to do more writing for a specifically Quaker audience. This is a part, really, of the personal/spiritual journey that I'm on right now. It is not that I want to abandon the broader public sphere in which I've participated pretty vocally for, oh, more than 30 years now. It's more that I want to try to bring things together: what I do in my fabulous spiritual home in Charlottesville Friends Meeting (i.e., my home Quaker congregation) and in other Quaker forums, and what I do in "the world", as well.

So one thing I decided to do was write this article for Friends Journal, which is the monthly magazine published by Friends General Conference, the principle network for (mainly) liberal Quaker congregations across North America. You can find out more about FGC here.

The article is a little bit personal, and it also draws on a lot of what I've been writing about here over the years. In it, I try to make the point that the peace testimony that has been a cornerstone of Quakers' witness ever since the Religious Society of Friends was founded in 1652 has more relevance today than ever. And certainly, my own professional assessment of the outcomes of recent "foreign wars"-- Israel's in Lebanon, and the US's in both Iraq and Afghanistan-- has also come ever more strongly to the conclusion that mere military superiority on its own cannot bring (and may well actually impede) the achievement of strategic goals of lasting value.

I guess for me, one part of the challenge is to try, when necessary, to keep my Quaker convictions separate from my professional assessments. But when they come together, as they do so strongly on this question of the utility or disutility of war, then I want to be able to claim that, too. I really do feel that a commitment to nonviolence and the nonviolent de-escalation and resolution of existing conflicts is more than ever, nowadays, a supremely pragmatic approach to the world.

Anyway, do read the article if you feel so led. I see there's some provision for commenting over there. But I'm not sure quite how that "registration" thing works. You know you can always comment here...

Posted by Helena Cobban at 09:54 PM | Comments (3)

Michael Massing, on Iraq

Michael Massing of Columbia Journalism Review has two excellent pieces in the current and upcoming issues of the New York Review of Books; and luckily for us they both available in fulltext, online.

The first is this one, which is a review of two fascinating-- though admittedly not new-- books that look at the original US invasion of Iraq from the "grunt" Marine's point of view. One of these books is by Nathaniel Fick, who was a lieutenant in the Marines in first, Afghanistan, and then the original invasion of Iraq. The other is by Evan Wright, who was a writer for Rolling Stone who was embedded with the military in Kuwait, as the count-down to the invasion continued. Then, after meeting Fick, Wright decided to abandon the cushy officers' digs where most of the embeds hung out and go along on the invasion itself with Fick and his 23 grunts, instead.

Massing's description of these two books definitely makes me want to read them... The war they describe is one that already, even as the invasion column was snaking its way up towards Baghdad, was committing some extremely inhumane (an defiling) acts. Massing is quite right to note that soon afterwards, the collective memory of many Americans tended to forget that. The collapse of the Saddam regime happened relatively quickly and decisively; and afterwards, Americans' attention very rapidly shifted to the very evident shortcomings in the US forces' planning for the post-combat phase, so no-one spent much time recalling what had happened during the invasion itself.

Massing is also quite right to contrast the gritty, inhumane view of the invasion phase that emerges from both these books with the uber-sanitized rendering of exactly the same events that emerged from the more august pens of the "big-time" MSM reporters like the NYT's Michael Gordon.

Massing also provides some excerpts from this 2005 interview with Evan Wright by Angelo Matera, in which Wright said,

    we've been steeped in the lore of The Greatest Generation, the title of Tom Brokaw's book about the men who fought World War II, and a lot of people have developed this romanticism about that war. They tend to remember it from the Life magazine images of the sailor coming home and kissing his fiancée. They've forgotten that war is about killing. I really think it's important as a society to be reminded of this, because you now have a generation of baby boomers, a lot of whom didn't serve in Viet Nam. Many of them protested it. But now they're grown up, and as they've gotten older I think many of them have grown tired of the ambiguities and the lack of moral clarity of Viet Nam, and they've started to cling to this myth of World War II, the good war.

    I never read Tom Brokaw's book, but if you go back and look at the actual greatest generation writers, people like Kurt Vonnegut—who wrote Slaughterhouse Five—and Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, and their contemporaries, who actually fought in World War II and wrote about it, there's no romance at all. In fact, a lot of their work is very anti-war.

This interested me, because I made something like the very same argument about the rose-colored view of WW2 in an article I had in the December issue of Friends Journal... (I'm going to write a separate post about that article, very shortly.)

Anyway, the second Massing NYRB article of note is this one, that's in the upcoming (January 17, 2008) issue of the mag. It is a very well-written appreciation of the "Inside Iraq" blog, which as alert JWN readers may be aware is one of my favorites.

When writing his article, Massing phoned one of the blog;'s contributors, Sahar, at the McClatchy Newspapers office in Baghdad, and he recounts a few things she told him:

    "People in America look at pictures of Afghanistan and think Iraq is the same," she said. "They think Iraqis are people who are uneducated, who are Bedouins living in tents, tending camels and sheep." Until the plague of wars began devouring the country, she went on, Iraq was the leading nation in the region, with a highly educated people boasting the best doctors, teachers, and engineers. Americans, Sahar sighed, "don't know this. And when you don't know a person, you can't feel for them, can you?"

    She continued: "How many have been killed in Iraq? Bordering on a million. If you realize that these are real people with real feelings who are being killed—that they are fathers and husbands, teachers and doctors—if these facts could be made known, would people be so brutalized? It's our job as Iraqi journalists to show that Iraqis are real people. This is what we try to advance through the blog."

    In October, Sahar, along with five other Iraqi women who have worked for Knight Ridder/McClatchy, traveled to New York and Los Angeles to receive the annual Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women's Media Foundation. Today, she is the only one of the six who remains with the bureau. The rest have all fled Iraq—because of death threats, because of the violence raging in their neighborhoods, because of (in one case) the murder of a husband, daughter, and mother-in-law by other Iraqis. In thus leaving, these women joined the huge exodus out of Iraq, a stampede that has deprived the country of many of its most competent citizens. Sahar, who herself has lost a son to the violence, is determined to stay. "This is my home," she told me. "This is where I want to be."

Anyway, it's great that Massing is able to shine his own, very strong spotlight on the excellent work of the Inside Iraq bloggers. As, too, that he brought those two intriguing books to my notice...

Posted by Helena Cobban at 09:30 PM | Comments (4)

INSS studies on 33-day war, and the next one?

The Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University has just sent me the latest edition of their "Strategic Assessment" quarterly. It contains the usual mix of good-sense realism with ideologized chauvinism that most SA editions have: maybe the mix here is about 75:25.

I was particularly interested in the two pieces on the 33-day war of 2006 (which the Israelis call "the Second Lebanon War", conveniently forgetting the two significant engagements of 1993 and 1996 in their numbering system there.) I was reading these as a follow-up to the INSS's book on the Second Lebanon War, which I referred to a little here, a couple of weeks ago.

The first of these pieces is by Daniel Sobelman, whom I've generally considered to be a fairly sober analyst. He's looking primarily at the changes that the 33-day war (33-DW) brought about in Hizbullah's political status within Lebanon. A crucial topic.

He starts off by, in my judgment, mis-stating something rather serious. He writes,

    Several events converged to bring twenty-nine years of Syrian hegemony in Lebanon to a finale: the string of political assassinations, the withdrawal of the Syrian military from Lebanese soil, and of course the Second Lebanon War.
I would say, instead, that the 33-DW helped to shore up a level of Syrian influence within Lebanon that prior to July 12 was at a much lower ebb than it was after August 14, 2006. And that, overwhelmingly because of the humiliation that Siniora and the rest of the determinedly anti-Syrian "March 14 forces" experienced within Lebanon during the war.

Though a serious misjudgment, that line of argument did not turn out to be the central thrust of the piece, which was more on Hizbullah's political fortunes within Lebanon, rather than Syria's. (And the two notably do not track exactly with each other other, though they do influence each other.)

Sobelman starts off with an interesting argument, noting that the (staunchly anti-Hizbullah) Lebanese daily An-Nahar now publishes a number of news reports that Hizbullah "undoubtedly views as sensitive from a security perspective", and that this "reflects the profound change that has altered the country’s political climate and the rules of the game within Lebanon to the disadvantage of Hizbollah." This is an interesting use of evidence, though it's quite possible it doesn't tell the whole story.

He notes, in my view correctly, that,

    public opinion in Israel seems focused on the military aspects of the Israeli campaign against Hizbollah... But today the outcome of the war must be measured not simply by the number of rockets that Hizbollah succeeded in firing into Israel for thirty-three days, or the organization’s success in rehabilitating its military capacity...
He then continues to make clear that it is the political outcome, as measured primarily by Hizbullah's status within Lebanon's society and polity, that is the crucial metric.

The goal of Olmert and Halutz when they launched the 33-DW was, we can recall, to destroy Hizbullah both militarily and also, if possible, politically, within Lebanon. As Sobelman readily concedes, they did not succeed in the military part of this. But I think he over-states the degree to which they succeeded in the political part.

Sobelman writes:

    In interviews granted after the two previous campaigns against Israel – “Operation Accountability” in July 1993 and “Operation Grapes of Wrath” in April 1996 – Hassan Nasrallah indicated that he measured success primarily according to Hizbollah’s ability to continue firing rockets into Israel until the end of the campaign; the success, as he saw it, in dictating the rules of the confrontation to the IDF; and the success in preventing Israel from driving a wedge between Hizbollah and the Lebanese public. From Hizbollah’s perspective and according to these parameters, the organization defeated Israel. However, in contrast to 1993 and 1996, the ceasefire of August 14, 2006 left Hizbollah much less protected than in the past. Neither Operation Accountability nor Operation Grapes of Wrath unleashed internal processes in Lebanon...
This is correct. The crucial difference was, of course, that by 2006 the Syrians had been out of Lebanon for a year already. (Which is why Sobelman was so wrong in saying in the lede graf that it was the 33-DW itself that diminished the Syrian position in Lebanon.)

So then, in December of 2006, Hizbullah and its allies from the Free Patriotic Movement launched their big street sit-in action against the Siniora government in the heart of downtown. That did not succeed, but neither was it rebuffed. Instead, it led to the political impasse in which the country has been locked ever since (and which I am about to go and experience firsthand.)

Given that the Syrians have not been militarily present in Lebanon at all since July 2005, I think the failure of the March 14 forces to impose the rest of their agenda on Lebanon-- that is, its Hizbullah-disarmament part-- indicates that Hizbullah did not "lose" the 33-DW at the political level in anything like as clearcut a way as Sobelman suggests.

In many other respects, though, Sobelman presents what seems like a fair and sober assessment of the balance inside Lebanon. He notes,

    While declaring that Hizbollah possesses weapons that could decide the outcome of the next war, Nasrallah made sure to point out that his statement was actually intended to prevent war. Hizbollah, which needs significant additional time to recover from the last war and rebuild the homes of its constituencies, has reached the conclusion that it should lower its profile with regard to the armed struggle against Israel.

    Much depends on regional developments. [Under-statement of the year, that! ~HC] ... In any case, in recent years Hizbollah has proven that it can adapt to changing conditions, even when this has meant somewhat tempering its ideology. Today Hizbollah is again checking its limits and, as always, remaking itself. The results of this process will be determined to a great extent by the solution to the current crisis in Lebanon.
The second article in SA on Lebanon is by Amir Kulick, an analyst I haven't encountered before. His piece is titaled The Next War with Hizbullah. I find that an intriguing subject, because I am always interested in how military planners, and strategic analysts outside of the military, learn from their experiences during war. And Kulick gives us an example of such learning which, if it is broadly replicated within the relevant government circles in Israel, foretells a much more aggressive and destructive Israeli campaign next time.

First, then, we have his assessment of Hizbullah's military performance during the war:

    It is clear that Hizbollah’s balance statement at the end of the fighting was mixed. Politically, despite its efforts to portray the campaign as a “divine victory,” the organization incurred severe criticism at home. Furthermore, much of its military infrastructure was damaged....

    On the other hand, the organization can claim success for its operational doctrine. Its forces inflicted many losses on the IDF in local combat, and above all, Hizbollah never ceased its bombardment of the Israeli home front, even in the face of massive air activity. The organization’s logistical forecasts also proved correct, given its success in preserving a large inventory of ammunition, thereby enabling Hizbollah soldiers to hit Israel with large numbers of rockets during every stage of the fighting (an average of 150-200 rockets per day were fired). From the organization’s perspective, these actions both brought about an end to the fighting and severely shook the “Zionist entity.” From this vantage, the operational balance was positive.

    At the same time, a number of weak points in Hizbollah’s operational preparations surfaced...

Kulick then looks at the changes that he believes Hizbullah's military has made in order to (a) correct deficiencies it identified during the 33-DW, and (b) deal with the new constraints placed on its freedom of action by UNIFIL's broader deployment within Lebanon and other present realities-- though his judgment is that "the deployment of Lebanese and UNIFIL forces in southern Lebanon has had relatively little effect on Hizbollah’s military deployment and recovery of its military capabilities."

Kulick does, certainly, give Hizbullah the credit of being a smart, learning organization. (As does Sobelman.) He also concedes that it, "in effect represents most Shiites in Lebanon" and that this "gives it a reliable political and social base, beyond the purely military sphere."

He predicts that Israel's

    next campaign with Hizbollah is expected to resemble the previous one to some degree: missile bombardment of the Israeli home front, a heavy Israeli air response, and possibly a more extensive [Israeli] ground operation than in the past.
Personally, I am not so sure of that. In my estimation, Hizbullah's leaders are inventive and their organization strong and disciplined. They might do something very different indeed-- including, refusing to play to Israel's military strengths by refusing to fight militarily at all... Who knows?

Anyway, Kulick evidently has high hopes in the IDF being a learning organization, too; and he lays out how he believes the IDF can innovate in all the key dimensions of warfare, in the "next" war against Hizbullah. This is where his article becomes very scary indeed....

Okay, I just made and uploaded a table in which I compiled the operational prescriptions Kulick listed at the end of his article, and my comments on those prescriptions. So you'll need to go and read them there.

I confess, that before I examined them closely, I found these prescriptions to be-- as I noted above-- "scary." But on closer examination they look highly unrealistic. They suffer from these key shortcomings:

    1. Above all, Kulick fails to define the political-strategic end-state that the war he describes-- which in his view, should include the insertion of sizeable ground forces into Lebanon, as well as stand-off actions-- should aim at. But surely, what the past five years have shown us is that, if countries do indeed intend to use forces overseas, then the key stricture of the Powell Doctrine regarding the necessity of having an Exit Strategy is more important than ever. Kulick says nothing about this! All he seems intent on is suppressing or destroying Hizbullah's military capacity completely. Okay... but then what??

    2. Also, as subsidiary point to this, if the IDF has been successful in-- as Kulick urges-- identifying and "neutralizing" (i.e., in IDF parlance, killing and destroying) Hizbullah's command and control structures, then how does the termination of the conflict get negotiated? An even worse form of quagmire looms herein.

    3. Finally, Kulick's plan requires the IDF to raise and maintain sizeable and very capable ground forces as well as, presumably, doing everything else it has been doing in past years: maintaining up-to-the minute air superiority, building a nuclear-armed navy, spending millions of person-hours running the movement control system in the West Bank, terrorizing Gaza, etc etc. Where will it find the recruits/reservists willing to sustain this kind of commitment? There was a reason the ground forces performed so poorly in the 33-DW. Mainly, it was because they hadn't done any serious operational training for many years. Kulisk's plan would require Israel to revert once again to being a highly militarized helot state carrying a huge manpower burden in its military. Do Israelis want that? How many years (or decades) would this have to continue? And why should Israelis even consider doing this, if the outcome is-- wait for it!-- yet another lengthy and debilitating quagmire in Lebanon like the one that followed the 1982 invasion??

Well, I hope I've made my point there...

My larger point is that my reading of all these recent INSS materials has confirmed and strengthened my judgment that the 2006 chapter of the IDF's decades-long saga of experience in Lebanon has now proved that, in that theater, military force alone is less capable than ever of bringing about politico-strategic achievements of any lasting value.

There has to be a better way in which Israel can deal with the threats its people face from across their northern border. And guess what, there is! It is called "a comprehensive negotiated resolution of all the remaining strands of Israel's longstanding conflict with its Arab neighbors." (As I urged most recently, in this CSM contribution.)

And yes, that certainly includes a final peace agreement with both Syria and Lebanon, as well as the Palestinians.

The Syrians are certainly eager to resume the negotiations for such an agreement; and I am just about certain that once Syria is engaged in this way, all the Lebanese parties-- including Hizbullah-- will follow along in its slipstream.

The Syrians went to Annapolis in November 2007. Before that, they engaged in serious and ultimately very constructive negotiations with Israel in 1991-96, which came close to reaching a final agreement in January 1996.

So why doesn't Olmert seize the opportunity to re-engage with them now? And why do Israelis in general still engage in the delusion that there must somewhere be a "military quick fix" to all their problems with their neighbors? And why does the US government just let Israel maintain this belligerent and anti-humane position towards its neighbors, while the US continues to shovel money and political support into Israel?

I don't really know the answer to those rhetorical questions. What I do know is that the lessons of the 33-DW-- as of the US's strategic failures in Iraq and Afghanisation-- are all well worth studying.

Posted by Helena Cobban at 04:20 PM | Comments (7)

UN officials stoking US belligerence toward Syria?

I've been reading quite a lot about Lebanon (and Syria) recently, because that's where I'm headed, for a short-ish trip, later this week.

This piece in today's HaAretz caught my eye. It's a report by Barak Ravid on the ongoing work of the NATO-dominated UNIFIL forces in southern Lebanon. It includes this:

    Israeli military officials express great satisfaction with UNIFIL's activities. A senior Jerusalem official singled out the European units of UNIFIL, particularly the Italian, French and Spanish contingents, for their professional manner of conduct. "They do their job and cause significant discomfort to Hezbollah," he said. "They have had quite a few successes."
Oh, what fun it must be for the militaries of these three formerly colonial European nations to be able to strut their stuff once again in the hills and valleys of formerly colonized (by France) Lebanon.

But the anonymous Israeli official quoted by Ravid expresses concern that the continuation of the political crisis may lead to increasing Hizbullah's room for maneuver. And then we have this:

    UN officials point an accusatory finger regarding Lebanon's political crisis toward Syria, claiming that "Syria defeats every attempt at an agreement and pushes Hezbollah and its other allies in Lebanon to increase their demands all the time." They say that Syria's President Bashar Assad wants to demonstrate at any price that "nothing moves in Lebanon without him" and predict that as a result the crisis in Lebanon will continue for months to come.

    The main problem, as the UN officials see it, is that not enough pressure is being placed on Assad. "He will only move if he senses a threat to the stability of his regime," they said. "If the Americans were, for example, to send ships close to Lebanon's beaches, that would send a clear message to Assad, but they're not doing that."

Okay, let's stop right there. What we have in the above paragraphs are direct quotes attributed to a collectivity of un-named UN officials. Tell me, how does that work? Was there a chorus of two or more of these UN officials speaking in complete unison there?

So, some extremely sloppy and mendacious journalism is one thing we have.

But what we also have is the report of these same un-named "UN officials"-- perhaps, more realistically, actually one UN official-- apparently inciting the US to adopt a more belligerent stance toward Syria.

Is this part of UNIFIL's mandate, I wonder? I sure don't see it there...

Posted by Helena Cobban at 02:03 PM | Comments (1)