Israel's deputy defense Minister, Matan Vilnai, yesterday threatened a new 'Shoah' (Holocaust) in Gaza, if Hamas and the other militant Palestinian forces there continue to send rockets against southern Israel.
This, in the midst of yet another round of escalation and counter-escalation that has occurred over recent days, causing the death of one Israeli civilian and of some twenty Palestinians in Gaza, including civilians and four (or perhaps more) children.
Haaretz's Amos Harel describes the "dizzying" pace of events between Israel and Gaza in the past week:
Hamas made up for its disappointment with the poor turnout by firing rockets at Sderot, injuring Yossi Haimov, 10, in an incident that was chillingly televised. On Wednesday, the IDF and the Shin Bet security service killed five Hamas activists who had returned to the Gaza Strip from training in Iran and Syria. Hamas retaliated with almost 50 rockets, one of which killed Roni Yihye at Sapir College, adjacent to Sderot. Ashkelon was also hit.
But as Harel notes, the options of what this "decisive" thing might be run from the radically de-escalatory (move into negotiating a ceasefire with Hamas) to the radically escalatory (a big ground operation into Gaza accompanied by, as Vilnai wants, some elements of "Shoah.")
We should note that just a couple of days ago, a new poll in Israel found an unprecedentedly high number of Israelis (64%) had started to favor the option of negotiating with Hamas-- even if only in the context of a prisoner exchange.
But in the present circumstances it is hard to see how a prisoner exchange could be negotiated without the other very immediate issues of (a) a ceasefire and (b) lifting Israel's economic stranglehold over Gaza also being on the agenda.
Condi Rice is to be in Israel next week. Will she be promoting the cause of escalation or de-escalation? Up until now, she and the Bush administration have favored or perhaps even pushed for just about every escalatory move the Israeli government has ever made against its neighbors. But it would be great if this time around she could take a calm look round and see the dangers for all involved in the region-- who now certainly include the US-- if she gives the nod to an escalation against Gaza.
Inside Israel, there is considerable wariness about the wisdom of launching a big ground operation into Gaza. Two big questions immediately arise:
2. (The much bigger question.) If supposing the ground forces succeed in seizing and holding a big chunk of terrain inside Gaza-- which is not really in doubt, though it could be a very bloody tactical "win"-- then what?
Finally, I can't stop this post before commenting on the horror and the complete inappropriateness of deputy minister Vilnai using the term "Shoah" to refer to what he was threatening in Gaza. He later backtracked some and said all he meant was "a disaster" (which is bad enough, especially if threatened against a highly populated territory in which non-combatants far outnumber combatants.
But in Israel, is the term "Shoah" commonly used to refer to relatively banal events? I thought it was used, like the term capital-H Holocaust in English, to refer to a single, extremely horrific episode of evil.
Anyway, as I said, for Vilnai to openly threaten a "disaster" for Gaza is bad enough. Politicians around the world should be called on to express repugnance for his gross bellicosity.
In recent days the 1.5 million people of northern Uganda have come so close to getting their extremely harmful 22-year civil war resolved... But now, the perennially disruptive issue of what to do about the indictments and arrest warrants that the International Criminal Court (ICC) has outstanding against the leaders of the oppositionist ("insurgent") is yet again stalling-- and may yet completely prevent-- conclusion of the final deal.
This report from New Vision's Milton Olupot in Juba, South Sudan, where the peace talks have been going on, tells us that:
Yet the ICC's indictments-- which came at the end of an investigation into "the situation in Northern Uganda" that was initiated by the Government of Uganda-- were only against the one side: the LRA. Of course, since the Ugandan government is the sovereign government of the whole relevant terrain and exercises strong control over access to the terrain and to the witnesses and documentation located thereon, that does kind of skew things for the ICC investigators, don't you think?
(Unlike in Darfur, where the Sudanese government has not been able totally to control access to the contested area or to the witnesses and documentation.)
... Be that as it may, I think it is still of the utmost importance for the people of northern Uganda and indeed the whole of that country that the very damaging conflict with the LRA be resolved-- soon, through negotiation, and in a way that is both politically sustainable and lays out a good path for the future.
"Amnesty after Atrocity??" you may ask in horror. If so, then go buy my 2006 book with that title, and read in particular the chapter on how the 1977-92 civil war in Mozambique was very successfully brought to an end precisely with the conclusion of a comprehensive peace agreement that-- along with many other forward-looking elements-- included a blanket amnesty. (The president of Mozambique is now the UN's lead representative at the Juba talks.)
On Monday, I had the pleasure of going to talk about these issues at Washington & Lee University Law School, in Lexington, Virginia. Now, I knew that the "Lee" in the name had been Robert E. Lee, the commander of the secessionist "confederate" forces in the US civil war of 1861-65. Just as the "Washington" was George Washington, commander of the perhaps equally secessionist "American" forces during the US colonists' more successful attempt at a UDI, back in 1776. What I hadn't realized was that, after he surrendered his forces to Lincoln's leading general Ulysses Grant in 1865, Lee actually became the president of this college in Lexington. My hosts there drove me past the small brick chapel where he is buried.
What does Robert E. Lee have to do with all this? Well, the Confederate (southern) forces in the US civil war also committed their share of atrocities. Both those directly related to the war (war crimes) and those perhaps not directly related to it (their attempt to uphold the institution of slavery, in general; which we can certainly classify as a large-scale crime against humanity.)
Concerning war crimes, the most egregious was probably the large-scale series of atrocities connected with the maladministration of the large POW camp the Confederates maintained at Andersonville, in Georgia. Of the almost 45,000 prisoners recorded as having been received at the camp, 12,913 died. I believe-- though I don't have the source for this to hand-- that no Black soldiers from the northern forces were ever even formally "received" or registered at the camp; they were simply shot or killed in more grisly fashion, on sight. Therefore, the 12,913 deaths recorded at Andersonville considerably undercounts the number of deaths/killings of captured or surrendered northern soldiers undertaken at the hands of the CSA forces.
And yet, at the end of the civil war, Robert E. Lee was allowed to go on and live out his life as a free man, and indeed as a college president; and all the forces under his command were similarly given a "parole", that is an amnesty, by the victorious northern government. And more or less, that approach worked, though of course the institutional disadvantagement of the the formerly enslaved African-American population of the south (and north) of the country continued for many decades further. And there were some (by comparison, fairly minor) excesses committed in the southern states by the officials sent down to the south by the north in the name of "Reconstruction."
But yes, more or less, the blanket amnesty embedded in a political settlement of outstanding differences (in particular, the one over the ending of slavery) worked at the end of the US civil war-- as it has at the end of civil wars and even international wars, throughout many centuries...
But now, the officers of the ICC, sitting in their elegant offices in the very peaceful environs of The Hague, thinking perhaps about which lovely restaurant to feast at tonight or how their generous, European-style pension plans are steadily accruing as they work, have been given the power to interrupt the process of peace negotiating in the desperate and desperately poor environs of Northern Uganda... And by and large, the "rights" activists of the western world continue to applaud the ICC.
It is a funny old world we live in. But let's continue to back all efforts for the speedy conclusion of a peace agreement ion Northern Uganda. It is time for the many hundreds of thousands of Acholi civilians who have been confined to "IDP camps" (concentration camps) by the government, in the name of war-fighting, to be able to return to their homes.
I've been doing some work on designing a website for my upcoming book, and considering different options for hosting it. One that I was briefly playing with this afternoon was to host it here, sort of alongside JWN at the hosting service I'm using here and for the new site to be in some senses a subdivision of JWN.
Big mistake. Setting up the templates for that apparently put down the JWN front page for a few hours. Then when the tech advisor (and son) tried to rebuild JWN, it briefly came up decked out in the colors of the still-in-development "Re-engage!" site, and with the "Re-engage!" banner there. Did any of you see it that way? It didn't last but a few minutes before it reverted to normal service. Strange.
Too much excitement for one night. I hope this does NOT happen again soon. (I am now strongly trending toward a completely different hosting solution for the new site.)
Hamas-linked Palestinian legislator Jamal al-Khudari has been working with colleagues in the Popular Committee Against the Siege to organize various mass nonviolent actions in the Strip. The latest, today, was a human chain along the length of the Strip.
Members of the PCAS had previously expressed the hope that some 40,000 Gazans would take part. In the event, only a reported 5,000 did. The rainy weather did not help.
This action is the latest in a string of intriguing nonviolent mass actions supported by Hamas over the past 15 months. (Read reports of two of the actions from November 2006 here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Read reports of the recent Hamas-organized mass breakout from Gaza, in last month's JWN archive.)
The latest action turned out to be, from some points of view, a bit of a damp squib. But the Palestinian organizers certainly got some useful information about the kinds of preparations Israel will be making for any future such actions. To put it mildly, the Israeli security bosses were running around crazy with their preparations for the big confrontation that they'd expected today. You can read a little about what they were doing in this piece by HaAretz's Amos Harel.
For many decades it has been a deep fear of many Israelis that one day a large proportion of the millions of Palestinians whom Israel has painstakingly pushed out of their homes and their homeland will simply walk home. More than 80% of Gaza's residents are refugees from within 1948 Israel. (Read Amira Hass's book Drinking the Sea at Gaza to learn more about the Gazans' deep yearnings for their family's homes in nearby portions of Israel.)
The fears that many Jewish Israelis have about exiled Palestinians simply one day all walking home erupted with new force right after last month's bustout of Gazans into Egypt. "Oh my, imagine if they had bust out into Israel!" was the tenor of much Israeli commentary at the time.
So in response to the many widely disseminated news reports about today's "human chain" action, here are some of the things that, according to Amos Harel, the Israeli security forces did:
They "were "enforcing sterile buffer zones near the fence, especially in areas near Israeli settlements. Which is to say the IDF shoots anyone who attempts to approach the fence in those areas." Such shootings have certainly occurred numerous times in recent months, often fatally. Remember, we're talking about people on the Palestinian side of the fence here. Thus, even though the Gaza Strip is extremely densely populated, the Israelis have concentrated the population even more densely by enforcing "free-fire zones" of some depth along the Palestinian side of the border.
Harel added these further details about the IDF's preparations:
The army plans to fire at open areas near the demonstrators with artillery that the Artillery Corps has been moving to the area over the past couple of days. If the marchers continue and cross into the next ring, they will face tear gas. If they persist, snipers could be ordered to aim for the marchers' legs as they approach the fence.
In fact, the IDF has already had to contend with mass marches on strategic points by civilian population. It happened in 2000 in the Security Zone in Lebanon, and it ended badly for Israel. It happened outside Taybeh, around an outpost manned by soldiers from the South Lebanon Army. It was the eve of the Israeli pullout when preparations for the move were well underway.
The SLA troops, in the absence of support and clear orders from the IDF and faced with hundreds of Shi'ite civilians whom Hezbollah had marched to the base, abandoned the site. In so doing, they triggered the hurried retreat by the IDF, which took place over three days, some three weeks before deadline.
For Colonel (res.) Noam Ben Tzvi, the affair is still an open wound, he says. Ben Tzvi was the only brigade commander in the Security Zone's western sector. His headquarters was in Bint Jbail. "Had the IDF insisted on blocking that march, it could have been prevented. But no order was given," he says. "We were unprepared for that situation. I hope the orders are clearer now."
He adds: "I wouldn't rule out selective use of live ammunition, as a last resort. The alternative is having them attempt a massacre of civilians in one of our towns near the border."
Helene Cooper had a good analytical article in today's NYT, looking at the differing views on the "winnability" of Iraq held by, on the one hand, presumptive Republican candidate John McCain and on the other, both the Democratic front-runners, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Cooper writes,
It is also true that the continued US troop presence in Iraq diverts attention and resources from the situation in Afghanistan, a place where for various historic reasons the US has a strong continuing obligation to help (at the very least) to help to rebuild the country. Afghanistan was a key battlefield in the US confrontation against the Soviets in the 1980s; and since 2001 it has been a key battlefield in the US confrontation against Al-Qaeda.
However, the exact nature of this obligation needs to be unpacked further. Most importantly, I believe the US needs to work with the United Nations, with Muslim countries, and with Afghanistan's close big-power neighbors China and Russia to maximize the investment that is made in rebuilding Afghanistan's society on a sound basis. Part of that effort might involve a continuing non-Afghan security presence in the country. But surely that presence should be provided by a specifically UN force, under the direct leadership of the UN, rather than coming from that old-- and distinctly "Atlanticist"-- Cold War relic, NATO.
But I can certainly agree with Clinton and Obama that the attempt to continue to maintain a large US troop presence in Iraq diverts attention and resources from the obligation the US has in Afghanistan-- and indeed, in many other places, too, including here at home within the good ol' USA.
Helene Cooper writes this about McCain:
Distilled to its simplest form, Mr. McCain’s argument is that withdrawing from Iraq would make Americans less safe in the long run, because a withdrawal would embolden Al Qaeda, put American interests at risk in the Middle East, and make an already volatile region less safe.
Cordesman doesn't actually sketch out, in the way McCain did, any specific scenario of dire consequences if the US should decide to withdraw from either Iraq or Afghanistan. He seems to simply assume that we all know that withdrawal would connote defeat. His main argument, instead, is that with the right kinds of US policies both these wars are winnable. Having recently returned from visits to both countries, he starts his piece with this bold assertion:
He then provides the useful service of spelling out what it is that in his view constitutes victory:
After six years of US dominance of the government and security system in Afghanistan and nearly five years of US occupation of Iraq, have we seen anything about either of these situations that encourages us to think that US is able to bring good governance to either country?
No.
If you go to the CSIS website, you can see a PDF of a 48-piece slide presentation that Cordesman presented on Feb. 13, as a way of reporting on his most recent trip to Iraq. The slides look to have been prepared mainly by the US military themselves. I found slides #3, 35, and 41-46 to be the most informative. In slide 41, he states baldly that the US military needs a further "half decade" to be able to sort out all the many current challenges in Iraq, many of which are, as the following slides clearly demonstrate, very political challenges, within Iraq's political system. (And therefore, imho, no legitimate concern of any foreigners, anyway.)
The various points of "positive achievement" listed in Cordesman's slides make a stark contrast with what we read yesterday in Nir Rosen's much more grounded reporting of what's been happening in Iraq during the surge. (Do you think Cordesman ever got out of the Green Zone? He gives no indication whatsoever that he did.) And on the news pages of today's WaPo, there's a fascinating article by Joshua Partlow, reporting on the big problems the US military and its local, "Iraqi Security Force" allies have been facing in the large northern city of Mosul.
Don't be misled by the inappropriately optimistic headline the piece bears.
Partlow writes this:
"We see the Iraqi security forces, more and more, take the lead and take the fight to the enemy," said Maj. Adam Boyd, the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment's intelligence officer. "You do see a capability that we have not seen before."
In recent months, three Iraqi army battalions have returned to Mosul from deployments in Baghdad. The Interior Ministry has approved 2,000 additional police recruits for the city, and a new Iraqi operations command is coordinating the efforts of the Iraqi security forces.
But some Iraqi soldiers say they have neither the manpower nor the equipment to defeat the insurgency in Mosul, where violence has increased over the past six months. As of mid-February, there were 80 attacks a week, a quarter of which killed or wounded people.
Mosul's ethnic composition poses unique challenges for the Iraqi security forces. Sunni Arabs constitute four-fifths of the population, and there is little of the sectarian violence that has caused so much bloodshed elsewhere in the country. But many residents are openly hostile to the Iraqi army forces, whose leadership in Mosul is predominantly Kurdish, viewing them as a force for Kurdish encroachment.
... The distrust among local residents limits the Iraqi soldiers' ability to collect intelligence about the insurgents they are fighting. The thousands of armed Sunnis who aligned with American soldiers and provided so much information about the group al-Qaeda in Iraq in other parts of the country have failed to materialize in Mosul. Dosky said taking control of the city would require at least two new Iraqi army divisions.
"The people, especially inside of Mosul, they don't like the new government," he said. "Very few of them have joined the army or police. They don't help us with information."
Many of the Kurdish soldiers don't speak Arabic, and some denigrate the Sunni Arab population in the city for supporting insurgents. "Kurd good. Arab no good," Sgt. Tayeeb Abdul Rahaman, an Iraqi soldier, said repeatedly in his limited English. "Anybody who doesn't like the army are terrorists," added Sgt. Major Mohammed Sharif.
Finally, the most ambitious and probably the most important piece of war reporting in today's papers comes from the NYT's Elizabeth Rubin, writing a long piece in the Sunday Magazine section about a lengthy embed she did in Afghanistan in October/November, with the US Army Airborne Brigade Combat Team in a remote valley in the northeastern province of Kunar.
Rubin's piece is a must-read. It certainly shows the huge amount of stress the US soldiers there are operating under. She focuses most closely on the efforts being made by 26-year-old Capt. Dan Kearney, the officer in charge of a small, fairly isolated outpost called the Korengal Outpost.
Rubin writes this:
Kearney refused to entertain that thought. He would tell his visitors, whether generals or reconstruction teams, that his campaign plan was clear, if modest: “It’s World War II Pacific-island hopping, turning one village at a time.” Over five months, he had gained about 400 yards of terrain. When some generals and colonels had flown in for a quick tour, and Kearney was showing them the lay of the land, one officer said to another, as Kearney later recalled it, “I don’t know why we’re even out here.” Another officer jumped in to talk up the logic of the operation. Kearney told me he thought: Sort your stuff out before you come out here. My boys are sucking it up and dying. . . . For besides being lord of the valley, he had another role to play — motivator, disciplinarian and confidant to his soldiers. “It’s like being in charge of a soap opera,” he told me. “I feel like Dr. Phil with guns.”
One full-moon night I was sitting outside a sandbag-reinforced hut with Kearney when a young sergeant stepped out hauling the garbage. He looked around at the illuminated mountains, the dust, the rocks, the garbage bin. The monkeys were screeching. “I hate this country!” he shouted. Then he smiled and walked back into the hut. “He’s on medication,” Kearney said quietly to me.
Then another soldier walked by and shouted, “Hey, I’m with you, sir!” and Kearney said to me, “Prozac. Serious P.T.S.D. from last tour.” Another one popped out of the HQ cursing and muttering. “Medicated,” Kearney said. “Last tour, if you didn’t give him information, he’d burn down your house. He killed so many people. He’s checked out.”
As I went to get some hot chocolate in the dining tent, the peaceful night was shattered by mortars, rockets and machine-gun fire banging and bursting around us. It was a coordinated attack on all the fire bases. It didn’t take long to understand why so many soldiers were taking antidepressants. The soldiers were on a 15-month tour that included just 18 days off. Many of them were “stop-lossed,” meaning their contracts were extended because the army is stretched so thin. You are not allowed to refuse these extensions. And they felt eclipsed by Iraq. As Sgt. Erick Gallardo put it: “We don’t get supplies, assets. We scrounge for everything and live a lot more rugged. But we know the war is here. We got unfinished business.”
Bottom line: I think it is highly irresponsible-- not to mention just plain wrong-- for Tony Cordesman to write, "No one can return from the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan, as I recently did, without believing that these are wars that can still be won." I very much doubt that Nir Rosen, Joshua Partlow, Elizabeth Rubin, or numerous other extremely courageous reporters who have been out on the front-lines would agree with that judgment. (Actually, I know that Nir doesn't.)
The US military is already stretched very thinly indeed between these two wars: almost to breaking point. And the costs of the two wars-- in blood, treasure, and opportunities for human betterment willfully foregone-- continue to mount at a truly alarming rate. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have given support to increasing the total size of the US military (which will further increase costs). They have also promised to draw down the US troop presence in Iraq considerably, as a way of freeing up additional troops to send to Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, the US cannot undertake a large-scale drawdown of troops from Iraq without considerable help from the international community. Specifically, it cannot do this without being able to reach an agreement on this matter-- and probably a number of other matters-- with Iran. And to win such an agreement it needs to draw in all the other major players in the region (as Baker and Hamilton understood); and it needs the help of the rest of the UN Security Council, too.
And if there is to be a successful socioeconomic and political stabilization in Afghanistan-- which is the definition that both John McCain and I give of "winning" there-- then the whole of the international community, and not just its "Atlantic" component, will similarly need to be engaged.
I'd love to hear the Democratic candidates talk a lot more about the important choices and tradeoffs involved in these two battlefields. Our country desperately needs a new-- and far more intentionally "inclusive"-- approach to resolving thorny security problems in distant places. Maintaining the old myths of "America's role of global leadership" or the US as the "indispensable nation" just doesn't fit the reality of the world's situation any more.
AFP is reporting from Kampala that the Ugandan government has signed a permanent ceasefire agreement with the Lords Resistance Army (LRA). This is apparently not the total final peace agreement, though that now looks very close indeed. ("In the coming days," according to AFP.)
The conflict between the government and the LRA, who are nearly all ethnic Acholi from the north of the country, has raged for 20 years-- or much longer than that, depending how and what you count. It has been very intense for the past 12 years. Many, many years ago the government side cleared nearly all the Acholis off their lands and farms and herded them into "strategic hamlets / concentration camps" marked by extremely poor living conditions and many abuses by government soldiers. The LRA, for their part, for many years undertook repeated hit-and-run raids against both government forces and civilian populations, including the kidnapping of numerous children whom they impressed as child soldiers, sex slaves, or porters.
The challenge of resettling the war-scarred populations (Acholi and others) will be huge. The whole process of making and then building the required peace process is an enormous challenge; and it has been considerably complicated by the insistence of the International Criminal Court on prosecuting the leaders of the LRA.
You can read some of my comments about this complication-- and those of other analysts far better informed than me-- over at the Transitional Justice Forum blog, here.
The negotiators have been doing their work in Juba, South Sudan, where the regional South Sudan Government and its vice-president, Dr. Riek Machar, have done a lot to facilitate the peace talks. Also playing a great role has been the past president of Mozambique, Joaquim Chissano, who has been serving as the UN Secretary-General's Special representative in the talks.
Both these leaders come from countries burdened by extreme poverty and very lengthy recent civil wars. Both have played important roles in helping to end those civil wars. So it is certainly fair to say that they know considerably more about how to make such a peace process work than either ICC bureaucrats sitting in their comfortable offices in long-peaceful European capitals or the (often very comfortably paid) westerners who work for US-based "rights" organizations.
On Tuesday, the negotiators in Juba reportedly reached an agreement on how the issue of dealing with the atrocities committed during the war will be dealt with. New Vision of Kampala reports this:
The agreement said the special court division would also facilitate the protection and participation of witnesses, victims, women and children.
"Less severe crimes can be dealt with using Mato Oput (traditional Acholi reconciliation mechanism) or even junior courts," Magezi said.
The LRA said it was happy with the document. "This is a very good development," said LRA team leader David Nyekorach Matsanga.
Here is another account of how the war-crimes issues will be dealt with, from the UN's IRIN system.
The next few days look as though they will be key to getting this entire peace accord completed. Let's hope it works out. I am still haunted by the conversation I had with a group of residents of the Unyama IDP near Gulu, back in July 2006. In the course of that, one of the participants, a peasant farmer called Angelo, said:
Btw, big hat-tip to Jonathan Edelstein for pointing me to some of these articles.
Nir Rosen has produced yet another brilliant piece of reporting, this time about Iraq. His piece, out in Rolling Stone today, is called The Myth of the Surge.
He starts by setting the grim scene:
He has a really apt quote from Charles Freeman, an extremely savvy veteran US diplomat who, among other ambassadorships, was ambassador to Saudi Arabia for quite a while:
At one point he writes, quite correctly:
Great job, Nir.
Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema has expressed himself foursquare against all use of extra-judicial executions (EJE's). He did this in an interview with Gigi Riva of L'Espresso that was published yesterday.
(See what I wrote about EJE's earlier in the week, here.)
Here, with lots of help from Google Translate, is what D'Alema said in the relevant part of the interview:
A: A car-bomb in the centre of a city I call terrorism.
Q: Some people said it was the Mossad.
A: Whoever has done it, it is terrorism. I find it also serious that the man was in Syria, which feeds suspicions on the regime.
Q: The car bomb killed the person responsible for some of the most (?) atrocious (nefande) actions that the Middle East has seen over the past 30 years.
A: I am against the death penalty imposed legally, so imagine how one should think about a death decided and undertaken in an extrajudicial way.
Q: [Is that statement] Valid even for the targeted killings of Hamas leaders by the Israelis in Gaza?
A: It is valid for all murders. It is an unacceptable practice. In combatting terrorism we must respect the rule of law. Extraordinary rendition, like targeted killings, has not enhanced the image of the West and has given an alibi for the terrorists.
Q: Returning to Lebanon, there are winds of war.
A:There are worrying signals, but our presence there makes things less bad. UNIFIL is acting also as a deterrent against possible outbreak of a civil war between Lebanese [HC: Really? Interesting that he thinks that... ]and is a key factor for the security of Israel.
Q: About Israel: One scenario would see an invasion of Gaza followed by an international mission to bring security to the area.
A: I shall not comment on scenarios. At some point it might be useful to establish an international force, but as a result of an agreement between the parties, not after an attack.
I am just delighted to see an EU Foreign Minister being so clear about both the moral quality and the pragmatic disutility of a policy that condones-- or of course, even worse, actually undertakes-- extra-judicial executions.
My piece on Why Lebanon hasn't slipped into civil war is in Friday's Christian Science Monitor. (Here, and archived here.)
If you go to the first of those links, you can also hear my dulcet (?) tones in an audio interview (14 minutes; MP3 format) that Josh Burek, my editor there, conducted with me this morning on the same topic.
(Small technical note: I wish his sound editor had ramped my volume down a bit, as my voice sounds a little loud and breathy there. I was speaking on a regular phone, pacing around my sitting room here a little bit as I talked. Larger content note/ memo to self: I really must find something other than "Oh gosh" to say when someone asks me a question and I want to collect my thoughts before giving an answer. Maybe next time I'll try: "Well, that is a great question... ")
Anyway, if you want to learn my explanation as to why dear, infuriating old Lebanon hasn't slipped into civil war, you'll have to go read the piece. But astute JWN readers would already have read an earlier take on this subject, here.
Also, check out this well-reported piece on the same topic by Michael Bluhm, that appeared in the Beirut Daily Star yesterday.
Interesting that the Economist recently used a quote from the portion of my January 16 interview with Khaled Meshaal that had been published on the Foreign Policy website, by agreement.
Hat-tip to eagle-eyed spouse for noticing that. (Okay, both of us tend to read our copy of the Economist fairly long after it lands in the mailbox.)
I'm still thinking about the intellectual property issues involved. Prima facie I would say the intellectual property rights to the quote reside with me. Perhaps with Meshaal himself? No. Because in granting me the interview, he was granting me the right to use his words-- with, of course, due attribution.
Well, I gave (sold for a very small mess of potage, actually) some limited web-publication rights to FP. I would feel better about the Economist ripping me off if they had given even FP as the source, since then people would have at least known where to look for that portion of the longer interview. (The whole text of which, you can read here, btw.)
Well, it is true that the whole of the Economist is written and edited by a large gang of castrati who subsume their personas completely with that of their beneficent employer and never use bylines. So maybe they view questions of attribution and of ripping off other people's work without attribution differently than the rest of humanity.
But still....
Anyway, FWIW I think they got their analysis significantly wrong in that article. They were trying to draw a clear distinction between Mahmoud Zahhar (= hardliner) and Khaled Meshaal (= not hardliner), and to stir up the idea that there's a significant gap between their respective positions. I think they misunderstand the different roles the two men play.
But then, what do I know? All I am to them is an anonymous, quite rip-off-able nobody. And they are the new janissaries of the global era.
Yesterday I went to a talk that key Barack Obama foreign-affairs advisor Samantha Power gave at the New America Foundation on her new book, Chasing the Flame, a biography of Sergio Vieira de Mello. De Mello was the charismatic Brazilian UN official who was the first head of the UN mission in post-invasion Iraq (UNAMI), and was one of the 18 or so UN staff members killed in the August 2003 bombing of their headquarters there.
But given Power's high-level role with the Obama campaign, many of the people at yesterday's event had doubtless gone with an eye to learning something about that, too. (Though I should note that Sam Power is also an intriguing, very smart and charismatic person in her own right.)
The Obama angle suffused much of the event. In the Q&A period, some of the questions were explicitly about him, his foreign policy, and her own foreign-policy views. Even when she was talking about De Mello, it was sometimes hard to say whether she was talking only about De Mello but also about that other charismatic guy, the one she works for now. (She also worked for him as an advisor when he first entered the U.S. Senate.)
So here is how she described five key learnings that she judged De Mello had acquired during the course of his 34-year career as a UN diplomat:
2. He learned the great importance of human dignity as an organizing principle for what makes people tick. He described it as the axle at the center of the wheel of all other human rights. In East Timor, when he was the UN Viceroy there, he was quite clear that what the Timorese people really wanted was to govern themselves, not have him there.
3. He had great a real humility, especially about how much he really did not know. But then, how do you deal with that and still engage? So what he had was a real commitment to empiricism, to constantly checking to see if what he was doing was actually working.
4. He would stress the importance of living a life that is not paralyzed or distorted by fear... He would often say, 'Fear makes a bad advisor.'
5. He had a really strong commitment to the idea of service. He didn't want to go to Iraq. but he saw the commitment to serving the institution of the UN as an instinctive one.
2. It should be someone unafraid of thinking outside the box.
3. It should be someone who is well centered and has a strong sense of his or her own self. (She drew a distinct contrast there with Bill Clinton in 1992 who, she said, had certainly seemed like someone who craved and needed an lot of attention from others.)
She made some intriguing comments about the situation in Darfur and the debate that raged in much of the human-rights community in recent years over how important it was to get President Bush and other political leaders to publicly define the Sudanese government's actions there as a genocide. (Power's most famous earlier book-- for which she got a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize-- was a study of US policies toward all the well-known genocides of the 20th century.)
She noted that back in 2003-04, when that debate was at its height, she had argued that getting Bush to actually name it as a genocide was not really worth very much, and might even be counter-productive. She characterized her argument at that time in these terms: "If Bush says that Darfur is a genocide, then everyone else in the world would oppose that and spend a lot of time parsing what he said. And then, what happened after Bush did say it,was that the UN set up a commission that worked for six months on investigating whether it was or wasn't a genocide. So the whole step of naming it became not a catalyst for action but a substitute for the kinds of action that were needed, which were to pay a lot more attention to intervening, providing airlift and training for the AU forces, and so on. Also, it is kind of hard to be for waterboarding on a Monday and then against genocide on the Tuesday..."
That was a great line.
Anyway, I bought the book on De Mello, and have been reading it with interest.
(Gotta get back to my own book. We have page-proofs. The publication date is May 15. Did I tell you that already?)
I'm terrifically busy with page-proofs of my book and many other things. But surely we should all discuss the news from Havana.
Ther NYT seems to have good coverage, here. That news page has links to a number of related items including the text of Fidel's announcement, here.
Some of the best material on the US reaction to Fidel's resignation can be found on Steve Clemon's blog, The Washington Note. Look in particular at this comment he put up this afternoon:
We need to stop thinking that we have "leverage." The whole point of Anya Landau French's article is that US policy failed and that the embargo has failed -- so let's drop the fiction about the US having leverage in the embargo.
The only leverage America has on lifting or maintaining the embargo is with an aging, Castro-obsessed, reactionary population in Miami that thankfully is being taken over by a more rational contingent of Cuban-Americans who have either rethought their views or who just don't carry the same views as their elders in their younger portfolios of experience.
We should be clear about the moral quality of the blood-drenched career of Imad Mughniyeh, the high-level Hizbullah security operative who was assassinated in Damascus on February 12, apparently by Israel. Mughniyeh has been credibly accused of having master-minded a number of acts that have to count as significant atrocities: the bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut, and then of its annex, in 1983; the bombings of a Jewish community center and an Israeli consular center in Buenes Aires in 1992-94; the kidnappings of western civilians in Beirut, and perhaps the killing of Malcolm Kerr, the president of AUB. (I am not counting here actions taken against military personnel who have after all placed themselves in a position where they have a "right" to kill under certain circumstances and also knowingly accept the risk that they might be killed.)
What should one seek to do with or about a person like Imad Mughniyeh?
My main answer when considering the question of what to do with the perpetrators of atrocities-- and let's face it, gratuitously launching a war of invasion against a foreign country is also an atrocity; and was certainly recognized as such in the operations of the Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals-- is that we, human society in general, clearly need to be protected against the future depredations of such people. We need to be able to credibly and verifiably incapacitate their ability to re-offend.
But, and this is a large "but", there are many different ways of achieving this. Containing such people, cutting off their access to the networks on which they depend for their depradations, and possibly even reintegrating them into society are all ways that the incapacitation goal can be reached. I have written a lot in this regard about, for example, the case of Joseph Kony, the leader of the Ugandan movement the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), who is credibly accused of masterminding and committing atrocities that were of an (anti-)esthetic order of repugnance far beyond anything Mughniyeh has been accused of doing, and that probably also ended and blighted the lives of many more noncombatants than Mughniyeh ever did.
Mughniyeh was far from the "worst" perpetrator of atrocities in the world, but he gained particular notoriety and attention in the west because so many of his victims were westerners.
Anyway, with regard to Kony, the majority of the Acholi people who provided the greatest number of his victims, though by no means all of them, have argued strongly for an approach to his incapacitation that is centered on his his reintegration into settled society. (That has put them at odds with the Hague-based International Criminal Court, which seeks to arrest and try Kony. But the Acholi and many or most other Ugandans don't want to do that, since it might drive Kony's supporters into further acts of retaliatory violence. Thus, the ICC's indictment has been stuck-- and because of it, so has the process of making peace and normalizing people's livelihoods in broad swathes of Northern Uganda... )
My main point: If you want to incapacitate a perpetrator of heinous acts, there is certainly more than one way to do it. At this point, we can identify three:
(2) arrest him and put him on trial; and
(3) reintegration, which can be thought of in a broadly political as well as personal way.
Despite the clearly extra-judicial character of assassinations, President Bush and officials in his administration have gone further than any other western leader in using the discourse of "justice" to refer to them. Right after the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush (in)famously said, "Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done." That second alternative there is particularly sneaky and bullying/aggressive, and is a direct abuse of the whole concept of justice.
In the aftermath of the Mughniyeh assassination, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said, "One way or the other, he was brought to justice."
The Israelis have used a policy of assassinations, in a relatively limited way, since as far back as the 1970s, when they killed a number of civilian, intellectual leaders in the PLO in retaliation for Black September's killings of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Even at that time, they went through one renowned episode, in Norway in 1974, when they killed a Moroccan waiter after having mistakenly "identified" him as my one-time neighbor in Beirut, Ali Abu Hassan Salameh. They did kill Abu Hassan himself, along with some passersby, when they targeted him with a car-bomb in the street leading to my home, in 1979.
Later, within the Palestinian community they assassinated Yahya Ayyash and Fathi Shikaki in the mid-1990s. And prior to that, in Lebanon, they had killed Hizbullah leaders Ragheb Harb and Abbas Musawi. (See Uri Avnery's devastating critique of the counter-productive nature of all those killings, here.)
In 1997, the Mossad tried to kill Khaled Meshaal with a chemical agent, in Jordan. But that was a devastating fiasco for the Netanyahu government, which ended up having to supply the antidote to the Jordanians and also to free Hamas's spiritual mentor Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and tens of Hamas and other prisoners in order to win the safe return of the two Mossad (= Keystone Cops) operatives involved.
The US took up the policy of assassinations in a big way after 9/11. (Much earlier, of course, there had been numerous CIA and CIA-assisted assassination operations during the Cold War, including against Lumumba, Fidel Castro, and others.)
But the new policy that the Bush administration pursued after 9/11-- "we'll 'bring justice to' our enemies"-- gave the Israelis very broad new permission to step up their use of ssassinations. The Palestinian Center for Human Rights records that between the start of the Second Intifada on 29 September, 2000 and 23 January, 2008 Israeli assassination operations had succeeded in "liquidating" a staggering total of 475 "targeted persons" along with 227 non-targeted civilians.
Among those snuffed out in this way were Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Abdul-Aziz Rantisi, Saleh Shehadeh, and many others from Hamas's leadership in Gaza. When Shehadeh was killed-- with a heavy bomb dropped from the air-- nearly two dozen members of his family, including many children, were also killed. On one occasion when they tried to kill Mahmoud Zahhar, he escaped but one of his sons was killed.
After the most recent killing of Mughniyeh, many westerners rejoiced. They seemed oblivious to two key aspects of the situation:
(2) To cheer at any act of extra-judicial execution is to undermine the whole idea of the rule of law.
Such incidents also, by the way, help ensure that the cycle of violence keeps on turning...
Didn't the "western" nations learn anything from the years of bloody slaughter that followed Germany's reckless decision to recognize the independence from Federal Yugoslavia that Slovenia and Croatia declared in June 1991? Now, 16 years later, the US and many -- but notably not all-- the EU countries look set to recognize the unilateral declaration of independence (UDI) that Kosovo made, from Serbia today.
The boundaries between the world's 200 or so independent states that emerged after the end of World War II were, certainly, highly imperfect in terms of following clear lines of demarcation between one national group and another. (This was particularly the case in Africa, where these boundaries were drawn up much more for the convenience of the various colonial powers than because of any rationality in terms of the social and identity groupings of the various potential citizens involved.) These boundaries were also highly unfair, allotting independent states to several tiny "nations" and none at all to many nations that were much, much bigger.
There were several different kinds of evolution in the nation-state system in the decades that followed 1945-- usually, in the context of the withering of the European-based colonial empires. But basically, the post-1945 world order has remained the foundation of the world's international order until today.
The Western-supported breakup of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia that occurred in 1991-92 was a serious, new kind of change in the system. And look what ensued from that. And now, we have the western-supported breakup of the Republic of Serbia itself. No wonder numerous states around the world that have substantial and relatively compact groups of ethnic minorities among their citizenries are concerned about this precedent. These states include western states like Spain as well as Russia and several of its allies.
Back in 1999, I was one of the few voices in the western human rights movement who argued clearly against the US-UK plan to bomb Serbia, supposedly as a way to "prevent" Serbia's ethnic cleansing of Kosovo. Remember: Prior to the beginning of the March bombing, Belgrade was doing only low levels of ethnic cleansing. But once the western nations had decided to bomb, they pulled out the OSCE monitoring mechanism that had been reducing the level of the Serb (and Kosovar) violence over preceding months. At that point all bets were off. That was when Serbia's ethnic cleansing campaign got underway on a massive scale.
OSCE's (unarmed) monitoring mission had been working. The bombing was gratuitous and extremely damaging. The suffering that occurred during the mass uprooting of Kosovars was horrendous. All that violence then then set in train further waves of violence and counter-violence within Kosovo. The Kosovars, who had previously had a very broad nonviolent national movement turned overwhelmingly to violence, with NATO's support. NATO marched into Kosovo to run it as a western protectorate, but without solving the deep problems of its internal politics, inter-group relations, or governance. NATO did win a veneer of support from the Security Council for its role there-- sort of like the ex-post-facto political cover the SC gave the US presence in Iraq in late 2003.
I think the Security Council is discussing Kosovo as I write this. Not surprisingly. The Russians are understandably upset about the abruptness with which the western countries terminated the negotiations and threw their weight behind the Kosovars' UDI instead.
This Reuters piece gives some essential background about the EU's new role in Kosovo. But it starts off with this piece of completely unwarranted optimism:
It's important to remember that there are many ways in which the cultural, economic, and political claims of ethnic minorities can be assured within the boundaries of a multi-ethnic state, and that these assurances can be won, and given strong political backing, within the context of serious inter-group negotiations that are backed where necessary by the international community. So many different countries around the world can provide examples of this! Think of India, or South Africa, or many, many others... A mono-ethnic state is a very Germanic ideal.
If Kosovo had emerged as an identifiable political/cultural entity in the same peaceful and successful way that, for example, Catalunya has within democratic Spain, then I'd feel far happier about sharing the joy that so many Kosovars seem to be feeling today. But for that to happen, the west Europeans would have needed to make a commitment to bringing a democratizing Serbia into the EU of the same order as the commitment they made to the still-democratizing Spain in the early 1980s. It is tragic for everyone concerned that this has not happened.
I have now uploaded the full transcript of the one-hour interview I conducted with the head of the Hamas political bureau, Khaled Meshaal, in Damascus last month.
I shan't add any additional commentary here. I have already provided some commentary and context to the interview in various posts here on JWN, and in this recent CSM column. And now, I'm going to be writing a much more comprehensive essay about Hamas's still-evolving role for Boston Review, where it will run in the May issue.
I'll just note-- though of course our readers here are all so smart that you'll have figured this out already-- that the interview was conducted exactly one week before the bustout from Gaza.
Meanwhile, there is no word from either Gaza or Egypt on the results of the most recent negotiations in El-Arish over an arrangement for the Gaza-Egypt border.
So now, after just under five years of rule by US military occupation, the historic city of Baghdad is drowning in lakes of human excreta. (Hat-tip Juan.) That item from AFP a couple of weeks ago reports that,
Gaza has been under Israeli military occupation for just over 40 years, and has been slowly drowning in its own gathering lakes of sewage for several years now.
Maintaining working safe water systems, and therefore also functioning sewage-disposal systems, is a fundamental function of government. It is especially important in areas that, like Gaza or Baghdad, are both heavily populated and flat, and that therefore have no natural run-off system. (And even where areas are mountainous and do have good run-off systems, the people "below" need to be protected from the run-off from the people "above", as the residents of numerous Palestinian villages in the West Bank that lie beneath Israel's hill-top settlements can amply testify.)
Different things are going on in Iraq and in Gaza. In Iraq the Bushists are guided-- as in all their actions, domestic and overseas-- by a profound antagonism toward the role of government as such in providing good governance. Hence all their quite irresponsible outsourcing of so many central functions of government to politically well-connected private contractors operating for profit. Now I'm sure that in Baghdad, the US administration and its local allies/proxies have signed numerous contracts over the past five years, under which contractors were charged with fixing the city's water and sewage systems. But with the Bushists' broad and wilfull disregard of governance issues, those contractors' performance was never adequately monitored, and no-one ever stepped in to say, "Okay, you contractors haven't performed, so we'll send in the Army Corps of Engineers to get this vital job done."
As a corollary, we should note that people who run military occupation regimes have wide leeway to exercise a wilfull disregard for the wellbeing of the residents of the occupied territories since they are in no way politically accountable to them. Hence the need for the provisions of international humanitarian law that specifically codify the responsibility that occupying powers have for the wellbeing of these residents.
In Iraq, the question of "responsibility" for water treatment and other basic functions of governance was certainly considerably muddied by the whole elaborate political play by which a supposed "sovereignty" was handed over to Iraqi political figures, though in many significant regards their ability to exercise true sovereignty remains highly circumscribed.
In Gaza, what has been happening on the sewage issue has been a certain amount of wilfull disregard of the Gazans' strong interest in this aspect of their basic physical wellbeing by the Israeli occupation authorities. But in addition, Israel's government has also been intentionally starving Gaza of the electric power and other inputs required even to mitigate the most threatening aspects of the sewage crisis.
Read, for example, this horrendous first-person account, published by Reuters Alertnet, of how the sewage crisis has been affecting the wellbeing of Gazans since at least last summer.
The writer, Manal, says this:
Six months ago this water pumping station opened right next to my home. It's part of a system that serves 60 percent of the population in Gaza. We were pleased to hear this news as we had no other option before but to dump our untreated sewage in wells. As you can imagine, this posed an immense health hazard to all members of the community.
So when the news came that our sewage would be treated and we would no longer have to dump our own waste near to our homes, we breathed a sigh of relief.
The new station receives 30,000-40,000 cubic metres of waste water every day, and it should pump 120 cubic meters an hour through each of six water pumps. But this is Gaza. From the beginning, the station had only three pumps installed instead of the six planned. The closure of Gaza borders since June 2007 by the Israeli government has meant that the essential parts needed to build the remaining three could not come through.
Electricity cuts have been affecting the efficiency of the station. The emergency generator is not functioning well either as it needs maintenance but spare parts are lacking. The limited amount of fuel that is let into Gaza is not enough to run the generator for long hours.
... This station was supposed to be a blessing for the neighborhood. It turned out to be a curse, a health hazard for us all. And we are now facing a public health crisis.
Sewage water is filling the streets of the neighborhood surrounding the station, and flooding the nearby houses - the stench is unbearable.
Tenants in ground floor flats were forced to leave and move to live with neighbors in the higher floors. People have been reduced to using sand to absorb the sewage water in their houses.
The number of children who have been taken ill has increased considerably. Cases of diarrhea are mounting by the day. Even now children continue to play outside amongst the raw sewage - where else can they go?
What disgusts me is that this could all be prevented if the Israelis had just allowed the opening of one checkpoint to let the spare parts and fuel through.
Children started their new term this week even though there is sewage water in the neighborhood schools. As with all the problems brought about by the blockade, we have to continue our daily lives, otherwise we will have nothing left.
... I ask myself and I ask the international community - how can children get a good education in this environment? How can they look to a better future?
And in Iraq, the six million residents of Baghdad also need to be saved from the stinking, health-threatening effects of military occupation. Governance in Iraq needs to be handed back to a genuinely sovereign Iraqi government that is accountable to its own people, not to any outside power.
Military occupation rule: it is always, potentially, a threat to the wellbeing and even survival of people and the communities they live in. It was never envisaged in international law as being a longlasting means of governance, but only a short-term stop-gap arrangement pending conclusion of a final peace agreement. These two occupations need to end.
Haaretz today carries a short video showing Rabbi Menachem Froman and close-to-Hamas Palestinian journalist Khaled Amayreh meeting in the garden of the Cave of the Patriarchs /Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron to sign the ceasefire-plus Accord that, as I had noted here, they recently finished negotiating.
It is a delightful short clip and shows the two men dealing in friendly and cooperative fashion with each other. It was shot, according to the voiceover "last Tuesday". On the clip, they sit at a picnic table near the Mosque/Cave with the Koran and the Torah on the table in front of them, and sign their Accord.
Amayreh says he spoke with the Hamas caretaker government in Gaza Monday night "and they gave me their total agreement for this document." He says that Hamas head Khaled Meshaal himself "accepts the document completely." He adds that the obstacle is the Israeli government, and in particular Defense Minister Ehud Barak. "I am ready to meet with Barak to discuss this with him," says Amayreh.
Froman says that the documents promises the end to all Palestinian violence including rockets and kidnappings. Amayreh says he cares about the people of Sderot, and he feels the pain of the Israeli boy there who lost his leg to a Palestinian rocket attack earlier this week. "All kids are kids, whether Israeli or Palestinian," he says.
Watch the video. Spread the word about this important initiative. This is some great news out of the Holy Land; and the ceasefire-plus Accord negotiated by these two very serious men deserves the world's strongest support.
CS Monitor today includes an interesting story about pending recognition of Kosovo's independence. The article is built around the theme that Kosovo's bid is somehow unique, that Kosovo has emerged without the imprimatur of the United Nations Security Council.
News flash to the Monitor: the UN Security Council is hardly the sole arbiter of international legitimacy in the world today. International "law" is not equivalent to Security Council "votes."
Kosovo's appearance as a new state owes to a long struggle for recognition from as much of the world as it could obtain. Yet Kosovo lies at a fault-line of great power tensions. Russia, not surprisingly, vehemently opposes the further partition of the former Yugoslavia, along with other (but not all) Slavic populated states. With Russia holding a veto at the UN Security Council, it's of course not surprising that the Security Council could not bestow its institutional approbation on Kosovo.
To legalists who narrowly view the UNSC as the sole "guarantor of legality among nations," Kosovo's emergence will be "illegal." Russia condemnation of Kosovo's "independence" as "illegal" is something other than "candid," when it alone is the reason for the technical basis of that claim.
To be sure, the UN Security Council, when it can agree, remains an important indicator of international norms and rules. But when consensus fails, the battle for international legitimacy goes on at other levels.
Kosovo's case for international recognition outside the UNSC was won in the broader battles for international opinion, what Thomas Jefferson, when reflecting in 1825 upon America's own revolutionary struggle, referred to as "the tribunal of the world." Serbia's claims to retain "sovereignty" over Kosovo were weakened by its own flagrant lack of a "decent respect to the opinions of mankind." It now reaps the fruits of that disregard for the opinions of a "candid world." Huffing about "international law" won't change that.
At yesterday's Capitol Hill panel discussion on "Re-calculating Annapolis" I tried to present the best arguments I could for the US to end its profoundly anti-democratic current practice of working with Israel and others to exclude and crush the organization that won the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections, Hamas.
The US, I concluded, should do whatever it can to promote these short- and medium-term goals:
2. A working ceasefire between Israel and Hamas;
3. Gaza's economic disengagement from Israel and its connection to the world economy either through Egypt or directly; and
4. A reconciliation between Fateh and Hamas.
I may or may not have noted in my presentation that the campaign to exclude and crush Hamas-- which has included giving full support to all of Israel's policies of besieging Gaza and undertaking large numbers of extra-judicial executions there and in the West Bank-- has actually had the opposite of the desired effect. Hamas has thus far emerged stronger politically than it was back in January 2006. (And meanwhile, the cost that these policies have imposed on the Palestinian people, and also to the Israelis who reside in the south of their country, has been high. In the case of the 1.4 million Gazans, quite horrendous.)
I should have quoted Uri Avnery's great recent quote that the Olmert government's actions against Gaza have been "worse than a war crime, they have been a blunder." But I didn't have time to. At the very last minute my position on the event's roster was changed from #5 to #2, so I had to do some very rapid last-minute editing/revising of my comments.
We spoke in this order:
As for our fifth fellow-panelist, Ghaith al-Omari, he was advocating a path very different from that urged by the rest of us. He spoke right after me, and almost his first words were that, "Elections are highly over-rated." He argued that trying to deal with Hamas, "is neither doable nor desirable." He acknowledged that Hamas, "represents a real force in Palestinian society and needs to be taken into account." But, he said, the question was "On what terms should Mahmoud Abbas be expected to reconcile with it?" His answer was that Hamas needed to be further weakened before Abbas could deal with it.
That seemed to me like a clear invitation to the forces currently seeking to punish and crush Hamas to step up their efforts. And this from someone who, though he is not a Palestinian, works for an organization that claims to speak in some way for the Palestinians...
In Rob Malley's presentation, which came next, he directly challenged the assumption underlying that last argument of Omari's. "Hamas is getting stronger and Abbas is getting weaker," Malley warned. "We should not assume that time is our friend." He also warned that the very difficult situation in Gaza could well be "the crucible of the next Arab-Israeli war."
He noted that the attempt to isolate Hamas had been aimed at pushing forward the "peace process." But he noted that had not happened. (A little later, Levy argued that the Annapolis formula "was the best that Condi Rice could win support for from the White House; but it wasn't actually a recipe for success.")
The major point at which Malley seemed to diverge from my views is he said he thought Mahmoud Abbas should mediate both the ceasefire asnd the prisoner exchange between Israel and Hamas. Personally I think that's a recipe for disaster because (a) Abbas is not even on speaking terms with Hamas at this point; (b) There is anyway an existing mediator between Israel and Hamas on these two issues, and that is Egypt; so neither side "needs" Abbas to mediate for them (they could also communicate directly with each other if they wanted; this has happened in some limited ways in the past); (c) from a national-interest point of view, it actually seems very inappropriate for Abbas to "mediate" between Israel and Hamas; and finally (d), the biggest point of all: Abbas is actually increasingly weak and irrelevant.
Levy made a couple of excellent observations. Firstly, that "We now have no fewer than three U.S. generals in the region working on this issue-- and none of them is doing anything that would count as de-escalation of the tensions." Secondly, that what he had been learning from his Israeli compatriots was that Hamas had discernibly been trying to target military installations with its rockets, while it was Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees who had been sending rockets simply into the (populated) general vicinity of the city of Sderot. "Though Hamas," he added, "has not intervened to stop them from doing that."
I was encouraged to hear that Levy's Israeli sources saw clear evidence of an attempt by the Hamas rocketeers to restrict their targeting to military installations. But that guidance certainly needs to be extended to their people undertaking other kinds of violent operations, too. (Hamas credibly claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing that on February 3 killed an elderly woman in Dimona; the two operatives involved reached Israel from the Hebron area, not from Gaza or Egypt.)
It was significant that though the title of our discussion was "Re-calculating Annapolis", no-one spent much time looking at the actual (and very sad) record of what has been going on in the post-Annapolic negotiations. I made a point, in my presentation, of noting the political impact of the fact that the Syrians-- after having taken the bold step of attending Annapolis-- had received nothing but a very cold shoulder from the Bushites in return.
But really, none of us spent any time discussing the minutiae of the current formal "peace process." Partly because so very, very little has been, in fact, going on. And partly because the whole confrontation over-- and the recent bustout from-- Gaza has completely eclipsed in importance whatever teeny baby steps forward (or backward) the "peace process" negotiations might have taken.
Talking of which, I found it intriguing to note that Salam Fayyad, the man whom Abbas picked as his Prime Minister after the Israelis had conveniently imprisoned a large number of the Hamas parliamentarians, has not been completely acting the role of compliant US/Israeli puppet. Fayyad's been here in the US, partly doing family things. But he also gave a couple of policy addresses here in Washington, DC. And in one of them he complained openly that the checkpoints that the IOF maintains inside the West Bank-- which were supposed to have decreased in number after Annapolis-- "have increased, not decreased."
Oh, and in further related news, on Tuesday Israel's housing minister, Zeev Boim, announced plans to build more than 1,100 more new apartments in occupied East Jerusalem.
Under these circumstances, is it really any surprise that Abbas is so rapidly becoming weaker?
I was trying to think through why the Bush White House and its Lebanese allies have been acting in such a provocative, escalatory way in Lebanon in recent weeks. There is no way the pro-US forces in Lebanon could ever hope to "win" a civil war if the country should indeed be tipped over the brink into one.
Actually, the history of the past 33 years in the country should prove that no-one wins if there is a civil war there.
So why do the US and its Lebanese allies currently seem so risk-happy?
Then it struck me. There are 15,000 UN troops, most of them from NATO countries, currently deployed in the south of the country; and most of them aren't doing very much there. (The peace is kept between Israel and Hizbullah much more by the deterrent power that they exert towards each other than by UNIFIL's lightly armed peacekeepers, as I wrote here, a long time ago.) But if a civil war should suddenly threaten to engulf the whole of Lebanon, maybe the Bushists would seek to get UNIFIL's mandate suddenly enlarged, so that its troops could intervene at short notice, and in support of the Lebanese side that the Bushists judge to be "legitimate"?
Obviously, I have no way of knowing if this is their plan. If it is, it would be a plan fraught with large numbers of dangers and uncertainties. For one thing, it's by no means certain the UN Security Council-- or indeed, most of the troop-contributing countries-- would ever agree to such an enlargement of the UNIFIL mandate. But if entangling UNIFIL in a Lebanese civil war is not part of the Bushists' plan, then what are they doing acting in such an escalatory and self-defeating way there?
Tomorrow is the third anniversary of the truck-bomb killing of former Lebanese PM Rafiq Hariri. Quite understandably, many of those most horrified by that killing are planning large-scale marches to commemorate it. This, amidst the the political crisis caused by the failure of the country's political leaders to agree on a formula for forming the country's next government. (That bottleneck has also led to the failure of the country's MPs to form a quorum large enough to elect the new president; the country has been without a president since November 23.)
Obviously, many Lebanese and their friends are concerned at the possibility that the spate of acts of violence that has occurred in recent weeks might, at this very sensitive time, tip over that hard-to-discern brink into a large-scale, outright, very damaging, and possibly lengthy civil war.
Last Saturday, February 10, I wrote a post here in which I said that the real story in Lebanon is actually that there is not, already, a civil war there. I also noted the efforts that many Lebanese political leaders, including those from Hizbullah, had been pursuing in an effort to prevent the outbreak of a civil war.
But on that very same day, MP Saad Hariri, the son of the late Rafiq H. and a leader of the anti-Syrian "March 14" bloc in the parliament, made a belligerent speech in which he said that if the country's "destiny" is confrontation, then he and his allies were "ready" for that.
The following day, Hariri's ally, the ever-mercurial Walid Jumblatt, went much further, issuing this very public threat:
(When I got to the bottom of my incoming mail pile on Sunday, I found a charming, Christmas card from Walid-- featuring a photo he had taken of the snow-covered steps of his family's feudal home in Moukhtara. Maybe I should have a conversation with him about Jesus's teachings on nonviolence sometime?)
Back in November, Walid notoriously threatened to unleash car-bombs against the Syrian capital, Damascus. Yesterday, just such a bomb did explode there. It killed Imad Mughniyeh, long wanted by the US government as being the accused architect of the very lethal attacks against US military and diplomatic facilities in Lebanon in 1983-84, and by Israel for his alleged role in organizing very lethal attacks against Israeli and Jewish facilities in Buenos Aires. Hizbullah's Manar website today described him as "a great resistance leader who joined the procession of Islamic Resistance martyrs."
No indication, yet, of whether Walid's threat of last November was related in any way to Mughniyeh's killing. But did the belligerent words Walid pronounced last Sunday about "We have no problem with weapons, no problem with missiles" have anything to do with yesterday's visit by US Undersecretary of Defense Eric Edelman to Beirut?
This AP report tells us that,
In the letter Edelman handed (Lebanese PM Fuad) Saniora from Bush, the American president expressed strong support to the Lebanese government and said that Iran and Syria are trying to "undermine Lebanon's democratic institutions through violence and intimidation."
All power to the de-escalators and the bridge-builders. May their efforts succeed.
We did it! In Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia, we voted Barack Obama overwhelmingly in the Democratic primary.
I'm watching Obama giving the victory speech. He's doing it in Madison, Wisconsin, since Wisconsin is one of the upcoming primary states.
But Obama's stupendous. He's talked quite a bit about the need for clarity on the war. He said some good things about John McCain's past heroism-- a nice touch. But then he said that McCain lost his way. That McCain, who had once stood against the tax cuts Bush gave to the rich but now he supports them. A number of times Obama made the link directly between the cost of the war in Iraq and the lack of investment at home.
He's been talking in a very personal vein-- about the fact that his mother was a teenager in Hawaii, and then his father left the family when Barack was only two years old...
Most interesting of all, though, has been to see him suddenly looking like someone who is ready to be president. He's been saying a number of times "When I am president..." and suddenly it looks as if he is growing into a self-realization of the possibility, growing into the role.
Half an hour ago, I saw a very mechanical speech from Hillary Clinton.
Oh, and now CNN has shifted over from Obama to McCain. The difference in age and energy level is evident.
Also, Obama was speaking in a huge, two-tiered stadium with tens of thousands of people there. (He has shown this amazing ability to mobilize large numbers of voters, especially young voters.) The camera there kept moving into a wide shot and then panning over the massive crowd. With McCain, now, all you can see is five other-- all white-- people in the frame behind him as he speaks in Alexandria, Virginia. One of them is, I think, the ageing and about-to-retie Republican Virginia senator, John Warner, who is 80-plus years old.
But McCain is also promising a respectful, decent campaign. Including-- I just heard him using Obama's signature chant of "I'm fired up and ready to go!" That, with a large smile.
There's much to mull over concerning Iran's pending parliamentary elections - the vetting process yet again. Yet for the moment, we have the American political circus to comprehend, and our own "vetting processes" are less than perfect. For our Presidential primary here in Virginia tomorrow, we are pleasantly surprised to contemplate that our votes might still mean something. Alas, (and this is Scott writing) my early favorites (Chuck Hagel, Bill Richardson, or Ron Paul) either chickened out, gave up early, or have been quite marginalized. But there is still a race on; in both parties, it's not yet certain who will win.
What's an independent thinker to do? I'm tired of being "embarrassed" every time our current President speaks, smirks, or slurs.
By contrast, Saturday's Jefferson-Jackson Day speech here in Virginia by Barack Obama gives me hope that we might yet have a President by this time next year who won't cause me to cringe:
[W]hile Washington is consumed with the same drama and division and distraction, another family puts up a For Sale sign in the front yard. Another factory shuts its doors forever. Another mother declares bankruptcy because she cannot pay her child’s medical bills.And another soldier waves goodbye as he leaves on another tour of duty in a war that should’ve never been authorized and never been waged. It goes on and on and on, year after year after year.
But in this election – at this moment – Americans are standing up all across the country to say, not this time. Not this year. The stakes are too high and the challenges too great to play the same Washington game with the same Washington players and expect a different result.
Many of these themes echo recent Obama stump lines. I especially like this passage:
If I am the nominee of this party, John McCain will not be able to say that I agreed with him on voting for the war in Iraq; agreed with him on giving George Bush the benefit of the doubt on Iran; and agree with him in embracing the Bush-Cheney policy of not talking to leaders we don't like. Because that doesn't make us look strong, it makes us look arrogant. John F. Kennedy said that you should never negotiate out of fear, but you should never fear to negotiate. And that's what I will do as President. I don't just want to end this war in Iraq, I want to end the mindset that got us into war. It is time to turn the page. (emphasis added)
Yes, this primary is personal for me. My son the Army reserves Lieutenant was just activated into the full-time Army, with his unit slotted for "deployment" later this year. So the ole' "pro-life" card has, shall we say, a different meaning for me.
McCain, Huckabee & Kenneth Copeland!?
As much as I once liked him, voting for McCain, Mr. Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran, or Mr. "stay in Iraq for a 100 years," would, for me, be the antithesis of "supporting the troops."
I do realize that many "independent" friends think McCain is one of them -- and that may indeed explain much of his success thus far. But for me, McCain gave up the "Maverick" mantle when he went with the imperialists of old, backing the surge and now loose chatter advocating staying in Iraq without end.
Huckabee for a few moments intrigued me. To be sure, he's the ultimate un-foreign policy candidate, and he's tried to turn it into a joke. (He's been staying at a lot of Holiday Inn's lately). When he wasn't "boasting" of consulting with John Bolton, his campaign did float some curiously "independent" ideas, such as the notion of serious talking to Iran (what a concept!) in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. He also notably criticized the Bush Administration for its "counterproductive... bunker mentality" towards the world.
I anticipate Huckabee might do better than expected here in Virginia, though more on social issues, as conservative religious "folk" here remember John McCain's blasts at them eight years ago. It was no accident that Pat Robertson endorsed Rudy Guliani - after courting Romney) Huckabee yesterday was "speaking" before Falwell's mega-church in Lynchburg.
But Virginia's "conservative Christians" are hardly a monolith; the formulas that worked before are in tatters. Jerry Falwell is gone; Pat Robertson is on the way out, and his once intimidating "Christian Coalition" barely even exists - even what it stands for anymore is a mystery. (A friend yesterday even hinted that the current CC leader is quietly supporting Clinton)
It's quite unclear (if it ever was) who "speaks" for the "Conservative Christian" vote. James Dobson vows he can't vote for McCain. (I doubt he'd endorse any Democrat, but his "threat" to withhold support from McCain is telling.)
The old televangelist leaders are also under siege, and the best known among them face much deserved scrutiny by Senator Charles Grasslee (R. Iowa). A "charismatic enron" has been in progress, and the empires of the mightiest of the "word of faith" (or "name-it-and-claim-it") preachers (think Richard Roberts, Kenneth Copeland, John Hagee, Benny Hinn, Paula White, Joyce Meyer, Creflo Dollar, etc., etc.) are starting to crumble.
There's a hook here to the Virginia primaries, in the form of an extraordinary association between Mike Huckabee and one of the most "in-your-face" billionaires of the lot -- Kenneth Copeland, of Newark, Texas. See this "irreverent" "Wittenburg Door" take on recent Kenneth Copeland gathering (with videos).
Billionaire evangelist oilman cattle rancher Kenneth Copeland, who sits so high atop the “prosperity gospel” pyramid that he has hundreds of “franchise” churches whose pastors send money back up the pipeline, spent much of his annual ministers conference last week talking about how he stonewalled the Senate Finance Committee, then boasted about having Mike Huckabee on his team.“Kenneth Copeland, I will stand with you!” Huckabee yelled over the phone, according to Copeland. “You’re trying to get prosperity to the people, and they’re [the Senate] trying to take it away from ‘em. I will stand with you anytime, anywhere, on any issue!”
Put crassly, Copeland is claiming that Huckabee will back with his "dear friend" Copeland because Senator Graslee's approval rating is "only 11%."
I've followed Copeland for decades. Along with Richard Roberts, he's a symbol for me of all that's gone wrong in "American" Christianity since the 1970's. The arrogance, greed, and corruption have been mind-boggling. While this is a huge subject beyond the confines of a short entry, the days of what I've dubbed (elsewhere) the "televangefleestas" may at last be numbered.
To my amazement, Huckabee appeared on Copeland's daily TV program for a week last November. This is toxic for the Huckabee campaign. I've found nothing yet indicating Huckabee distanced himself from Copeland. If McCain & co. haven't yet picked up on this, it's a "gold mine" waiting to exploit, should Huckabee surprise tomorrow.
Egypt's national football (soccer) team won the African Nations Cup final in Ghana last night. Huge congratulations to them and to their scorer! Muhammad Abu Treika (no. 22).
Abu Treika is probably today the best-known 29-year-old in Africa and perhaps the whole of the Muslim world. If you want to see one amazing recent goal he scored, look at the second goal on this Youtube clip. Abu Treika had already won attention by raising his No.22 shirt at the end of a game in an earlier round of the cup, revealing a tee-shirt underneath that said "Sympathize with Gaza." (See his explanation of this, to English Al-Jazeera, here.) But the guy is also just an amazing player: intuitive and disciplined at the same time.
For those US or other readers who don't know much about football the way the whole of the non-US world plays it, or who don't know much about Abu Treika, Time's Scott MacLeod has a nice post on Abu Treika, and on the wildly enthusiastic reaction that last night's win saw in downtown Cairo. (Hat-tip Bram.)
MacLeod writes:
It is Aboutreika's character as much as his playing that endears him to his fans. His gesture to the Palestinians was in keeping with his active involvement in humanitarian causes, such as his role as a World Food Program Ambassador Against Hunger. In Egypt, he's known as a devout, humble man who has not let success go to his head. He has been photographed with his mother, who wears a traditional hijab, or headscarf. "He's a great player, but he's also honest and knows his god," a kid in the cafe wearing a Billabong sweatshirt tells me. Once, as the new young star for the Egyptian Tersana team, Aboutreika refused to sign a contract that elevated his salary way above those of his teammates. "We need to stop this habit of praising an individual player," he told reporters after the 2006 Cup victory. "It isn't Aboutreika, but the whole team who got the Cup. Without the others' efforts, I can't ever make anything." His first words after tonight's victory: "It's one of the greatest days of my life."
Except, that is, a certain No. 22 footballer who sent Egyptians by the millions into the streets tonight. After the winning goal, Gamal, a brick layer next to me, sits down and kisses his fingers. "Thanks to God," he says. "It's a victory for my country, my people." As I passed Tahrir Square on the way home after the match, gathering crowds were waving the Egyptian flag and whooping it up. And they were chanting, "A-bou Trei-ka! A-bou Trei-ka! A-bou Trei-ka!"
... so what's going on?
This is a really interesting story, though most of the western ("If it bleeds, it leads") MSM haven't even started to notice it.
But what's been happening in Lebanon since even before the Feb. 14, 2005 killing of ex-PM Rafiq Hariri is that-- okay, in addition to the ghastly Israeli assault of summer 2006, and the brutal fighting at Nahr al-Bared refugee camp last summer-- there have been numerous other sporadic acts of lethal violence. And each time, many people around the world would perk up their ears and say, "Oh my! Is Lebanon about to plunge back into civil war?" But it doesn't happen.
Why not?
I think this is due, in large part, to the sense of realism and political wisdom that so many Lebanese political leaders actually have. Starting with the country's biggest party, Hizbullah, but extending far beyond them. Nearly all the acts of violence that have occurred since late 2004 have been unclaimed, and unexplained. Under those circumstances, normally, people would have every reason to be fearful. Where might it happen next, and to whom? People would be on-edge and ready to "counter-attack first". Back in December 2006, there was a small eruption of fighting between Sunni and Shiite militias in South Beirut. But it was rapidly contained and defused. Last Sunday, there was another such cliffhanging incident. Again, it got contained. There is evidently some very serious and intentional conflict-defusing work going on there, for which the people of Lebanon and the region should all be glad.
I'm just thinking back to the few days I spent in the generally cosmopolitan hub of Ras Beirut last month. Ras Beirut seemed a lot more relaxed and pleasant to be in then, than it did when we were there for two months in later 2004 (i.e., before the Hariri killing.) Maybe that had to do with the removal of the Syrian military presence from the country, which happened-- as a response to Hariri killing-- in summer of 2005.
Last month, the main gripe of many people in Ras Beirut was against the selfishness and arrogance that so many local parliamentarians seem to display in various facets of their personal and political lives. The parliamentarians have periodically been enacting their big drama of "Can they convene enough MPs together and reach agreement on the formula for forming the next government?" Yesterday, they just postponed that constitutionally vital session for the 14th time. As a result, the country still doesn't have a president. The sitting ministers-- that is, all the non-Shiite ones, since the Shiite ones all resigned a year or so back-- continue to get their hefty salaries and to do not very much of anything except renew the contracts they all gave to their friends a while back. The MPs also take their salaries, and throw out huge barricades around their lavish residences, which inconvenience everyone else no end. No legislating, and precious little real governing, gets done at all. The country generally keeps running along, even if in an extremely unorthodox way.
Lebanon, remember, is a country whose founding ethos was one of aversion to, or flight