'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Human Rights Watch opposes Egypt's political arrests

Kudos to Human Rights Watch for having issued a strong statement criticizing the Egyptian government’s continuing mass round-up of opposition activists and would-be candidates. This campaign, HRW said, "puts the legitimacy of upcoming local and municipal council elections in serious doubt."

It is an excellent statement. Go read it.

Condi Rice is currently in the Middle East. She should be peppered with questions as to why strong US aid to Egypt continues under these circumstances.

U.S. position in Iraq eroding fast

The L.A. Times has quoted Joost Hiltermann as saying that Moqtada Sadr looks like the emerging political force inside Iraq, while US-installed PM Nouri al-Maliki looks like a lame duck. But the developments of the past week have had a much wider impact than that. With Maliki's US-backed forces licking the significant wounds they received from their drubbing in Basra and mortar attacks on the Baghdad Green Zone still continuing, it now looks as if the US military's ability to maintain its position of dominance in Iraq-- let alone "project" its power from there to anywhere else, including of course Iran-- has been significantly eroded.

Worth noting: it was not just any Iranian body or individual who brokered the most recent ceasefire around Basra. It was the Commander of the Qods (Jerusalem) Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Yes, the same IRGC that the Bush administration recently decided, with much fanfare, to put onto the US's "terrorism list."

So much for the U.S. government's jejune and often actively counter-productive practice of seeking to exclude significant political forces from any negotiations through the use of these "lists." (Lists that have little basis in objective reality since they exclude the perpetrators of many well-documented acts of state terrorism such as assassinations and deliberate attempts to starve civilian populations into political submission. Well, I guess the U.S. government cannot count acts like those as "terrorism", since Washington itself and its Israeli ally rely on them a lot.)

So here we have IRGC restoring-- I hope-- a measure of calm and a political breathing space to Basra and its environs in southern Iraq by mediating a negotiation among the relevant parties, while Gen. Petraeus and his superiors have to stand on the sidelines.

Paul Krugman says it best, when he notes about US policy in Iraq that,

America is spending $12 billion a month to sustain what has, in practice, become an Iranian sphere of influence.

Basra now clearly looks to have been Maliki's "bridge too far." And given the degree to which the US "plan" in Iraq-- if we can dignify Washington's hastily-cobbled-together string of reactions to Iraqi developments with that name-- has been reliant on the Maliki government developing some coherence and ability to govern, the debacle he and his forces suffered in Basra may well come to be seen as a turning point for US power in Iraq and in the Gulf region as a whole.

After this, does all the water of US pretensions in the Gulf region just swoosh down the plug-hole fairly rapidly? Could happen.

If the debacle that befell Maliki's forces in Basra is not now to expand into a disorderly chaos for the whole of the US position in Iraq, Washington needs to start talking to all of Iraq's neighbors about the situation there, rather quickly. Most especially Iran.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon should convene these negotiations with utmost haste.

One last point. Though for now it looks as if Iran has emerged from the events of the past week as the most powerful force in Iraq, Badger of Missling Links provides some further nuance to the story, noting that there is also an Iraqi-nationalist sub-theme to what has been going on-- and therefore, necessarily, a degree of continuing negotiation required between the Iraqi nationalist trends and the more solidly pro-Iranian trends within the anti-US coalition. There are many parallels there with the situation in Lebanon as Israel's occupation of the country started falling apart in the late 1980s, and most particularly the still-continuing negotiations there between the Lebanese-nationalist trends and the more solidly pro-Syrian trends...

Interesting times.

Charlottesville forum: US, Iran, & Hope?

For those near Charlottesville, Virginia Sunday evening, consider joining a forum on US-Iran Relations that convenes at 6:00 p.m. at the Charlottesville Mennonite Church. (corner of Monticello Ave. and Avon Streets)

Hosted by Rev. Roy Hange, (who lived in Iran with his family earlier this decade) the forum features a panel of three Iran observers, Carah Ong, myself (Scott Harrop), and our venerable neighbor R.K. Ramazani.

Long time readers of Just World News will recall we have featured Professor Ramazani's essays several times. Drawing from his 55 years (and counting) of scholarship and observations on US-Iran relations, I anticipate he will be focusing on the paradox of what divides and yet pulls together Iran and the United States, nearly 3 decades after the Iranian revolution.

Carah Ong is currently the Iran Policy Analyst at the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation. See her solid Iran focused blog, especially her coverage of Iran nuclear issues, Congress, and interesting reports of her recent journey to Iran.

Our prepared comments will consider our working question -- what "reasons for hope" can we discern for improving ties between the US and Iran?

As a hook to the evening, see the Thursday night University of Georgia panel of five former American Secretaries of State, Powell, Albright, Kissinger, Baker, and even Christopher, and how they agreed on two points -- that Gitmo needs to be shut down and that the US should be talking to Iran.

Fancy that. For the past seven years, the Bush Administration has been trapped by its own novel idea, at least towards Iran, that a state doesn't talk to other states of which it disapproves, lest it somehow grant them "legitimacy" in the talking. Our current Secretary of State now claims she wishes to talk to Iran, even as she retains conditions widely known to short-circuit the process.

That five former Secretary of States appear to have repudiated that approach, at least to me, provides a significant ray of hope. That said, even If we at least can see the need to talk to Iran, questions remain not just about what to talk about, yet also how we should talk to Iran with any hope of a positive result

Learning "how to talk to Iran" will be the focus of my remarks. Stay tuned. (or better yet, join us live.)

Note: Charlottesville Mennonite Church is located just to the south east of the downtown mall. Here's conventional directions on how to get to it: 701 Monticello Avenue.

Is this what the current fighting in Basra is about?

When the Brits withdrew from Basra city to Basra airport last year, I was intrigued by the strategic implications of this at a number of levels. Most broadly, it seemed to represent a judgment by the British government and general staff that the "western" coalition of which the UK is a part could not "win" in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and that Afghanistan was more important. (See Dannatt.)

That was obviously, in itself, bad news for those in the US military still tasked by their political bosses to "win" in Iraq. But even worse news for the US military is that the space the Brits were withdrawing from was (and remains) an absolutely vital node on the supply chain for the whole US military in Iraq.

Ever since July 2005, I have been underlining the importance of Basra to the supply chain of the occupation force.

Now, however, it seems that Petraeus and his Centcom superiors may have finally twigged to the importance of Basra. Peter Oborne of Britain's Daily Mail reports that:

Already at the Basra air base, I can reveal, the British subsidiary of U.S. construction giant KBR is building four huge dining facilities - known to the American army as DFACs. These are capable of feeding 4,000 men and suggest that the U.S. Army is contemplating a massive deployment to southern Iraq - including a major presence inside Basra itself.

(Hat-tip to Cloned Poster for his comment at Pat Lang's blog, for that.)

So that construction has evidently been planned for some time now... But here was a problem for Petraeus and Co in their project to implant a 4,000-person base in Basra: Iraq is allegedly a "sovereign" state. So how to get Nuri al-Maliki's allegedly "sovereign" government to agree to the creation of this new base?

Did they, essentially, snooker Maliki into getting into a firefight with the Sadrists in Basra that he very evidently couldn't win, and that would therefore lead him to call in a robust US (oh, excuse me, "coalition") ground-force presence there?

Badger of Missing Links has been doing a great job of following the still-evolving story of the new escalation between the Maliki-US axis and the Sadrists. In this post yesterday, he highlighted a great report from Lebanon's Al-Akhbar that noted the self-deception Maliki has been engaging in by imagining himself not only a military leader but also one who by traveling to the battlefront in Basra could help to rally his forces. (Several alternative explanations of his strange trip to Basra are also possible.)

It hasn't worked, of course. Indeed, thus far it has been a debacle. Having earlier given a 3-day deadline for the Sadrist/resistance forces in Basra to lay down their weapons, they then extended that to ten days amid reports that it was the government forces that have been majorly laying down their weapons, instead.

Yesterday, the US military sent in its airpower against suspected opposition sites in Basra, and today they did the same again.

The WaPo's Karen DeYoung has some intriguing tidbits, in a report written apparently from Washington DC, about the laments voiced by an (anonymous) "senior official familiar with U.S. intelligence in southern Iraq" to the effect that,

our intelligence in that area is far less than we would like. We don't have any forces there... [W]e are operating with a good dose of opaqueness.

I also want to draw attention to the fine round-up of war-related news from Iraq that WaPo.com's Dan Froomkin wrote yesterday.

That round-up included this:

I called attention yesterday to two Time magazine articles that today seem even more prescient and are worth mentioning again. Charles Crain noted how chief military spokesman Maj. Gen. Kevin Bergner (" Bush's Baghdad Mouthpiece") refused to say "whether the Americans would become involved more directly if the Iraqi government could not complete its Basra operation. 'I would say,' he said, 'that's a very hypothetical question at this time.'" But, Crain wrote: "It is also the question of the hour. If the violence continues to intensify and the Iraqi government cannot finish what it started then the U.S. must choose whether to throw its troops into the fight."

And Darrin Mortenson wrote: "If the U.S. decides to actively go after the Shi'ite forces in the south, it would mean reopening a southern front where American forces once fought some of the Iraq war's fiercest battles against Sadr but now have only a shadow presence. That would involve draining the concentration of surge troops around Baghdad and the Sunni triangle. It might even require more troop extensions or additional deployments to hold ground and maintain modest gains. Moving against the Shi'ite strongholds could then open opportunities for the Sunni fighters of al-Qaeda to strike Iraqi and U.S. targets in the Sunni triangle as the American heat turns south."

Froomkin is also excellent at noting the blithe idiocy of the US commander-in-chief. He provides what seems like an excellent critique of the big, cheerleading speech that Bush made on Iraq, Thursday.

Froomkin wrote:

Mocking his critics, Bush asked yesterday: "If America's strategic interests are not in Iraq -- the convergence point for the twin threats of al Qaeda and Iran, the nation Osama bin Laden's deputy has called 'the place for the greatest battle,' the country at the heart of the most volatile region on Earth -- then where are they?"

The obvious answer: Pakistan's rugged tribal area, where bin Laden and the real al-Qaeda are said to be actively re-establishing al-Qaeda training camps.

And Bush, whose prognostication skills have been almost uniformly poor when it comes to Iraq, spoke with great certainty about what would happen if U.S. forces came home:

"The reality is that retreating from Iraq would carry enormous strategic costs for the United States," he said. "It would incite chaos and killing, destroy the political gains the Iraqis have made, and abandon our friends to terrorists and death squads. It would endanger Iraq's oil resources and could serve as a severe disruption to the world's economy. It would increase the likelihood that al Qaeda would gain safe havens that they could use to attack us here at home. It would be a propaganda victory of colossal proportions for the global terrorist movement, which would gain new funds, and find new recruits, and conclude that the way to defeat America is to bleed us into submission. It would signal to Iran that we were not serious about confronting its efforts to impose its will on the region. It would signal to people across the Middle East that the United States cannot be trusted to keep its word. A defeat in Iraq would have consequences far beyond that country -- and they would be felt by Americans here at home."

On each and every count, however, as critics like retired Gen. William Odom have long been arguing, it's quite possible that the exact opposite is true.

Let's assume, though, that military planners a few levels under Bush have a better grasp on reality than him; and also that perhaps they have some plan in mind in having egged Maliki into a confrontation with the Sadrists at this time. If so, a concept that would lead to the reinforcement of the "coalition" positions and ground capabilities in Basra would seem to have considerable rationality.

And that is the case, regardless of what any bigger US military "plan" for Iraq might be. Indeed, reinforcing the US positions in Basra would certainly be a worthy goal to win even if it involves leaving US positions elsewhere in the country much more vulnerable, or even letting huge additional areas of Iraq fall out of their hands.

To recall the importance of Basra and retaining control of military supply lines through Basra, just recall what happened to the British-Indian expeditionary force in Iraq in 1915-16. Was it 23,000 troops that they lost there?

In Canada

I've been in Canada for the past 27 hours. What a breath of fresh air! I mean, to fly to a place (Toronto) where the airport book store puts out front of the store to attract readers a lot of books by Noam Chomsky and Patrick Cockburn already tells you you're not in the US any more....

I had a bit of an embarrassment at the passport line there. The guy behind the counter said, "So when were you last here?" I wasn't feeling very sharp and I'd been thinking about my kids a lot, so I recalled a family driving trip we made to Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks in the (American) Rocky Mountains, back in 1993 or 1994, at the end of which we drove back east through Canada. So I said, "Oh, I think it was 1993 or 1994." I had completely forgotten (1) a short visit I made to Windsor, Ontario, with my daughter Leila when she was living in nearby Detroit in 2001 or so, and (2) the visit I made to London, Ontario to speak to a conference in probably 2004 or so.

No wonder the guy looked at me as if I was dissembling. Forgetting is what I was doing... If I hadn't been a White person, or if I'd been a person of Muslim origin, would he have been a lot less forgiving?

Anyway, I'm now in Victoria, BC, which is actually the capitol of BC. I had a bit of a chance to explore this morning. It seems like Wellington, New Zealand, in so many ways: Lots of water lacing in and out of the land-masses; great deep-water port; an important political capitol; bracing fresh air; fascinating attempts to come to terms with the past sufferings of the indigenous people; a very colonially "English" place in many ways.

Boy, did those British naval explorers of the 18th century know how to seize control of and develop great deep-water ports in so many handy places around the world!

I went to the Royal British Columbia Museum, which has a wonderful-- and extremely poignant-- exhibit on the "First Nations (indigenous peoples) of coastal BC.

It was so tragic, I almost couldn't bear it.

One of the things that made it seem particularly tragic was that-- as in the Te Papa Museum in Wellington-- they had many black-and-white photographs of the First Nations people here, made in the second half of the 19th century.

Somehow seeing this very modern, and at one deep level quite "true" and irrefutable, representation of these people underlines in in an unarguable way the fact of their existence, the dignity and integrity of their existence, and the unspeakable tragedy of the fate they met from the White colonialists.

They even had a short moving-picture clip, taken in 1914, of three large Haida canoes moving over water, each with a costumed spiritual/dancing figure in front who danced on the boat while the canoeists beat on their seats with their paddles. Very eery, mysterious, and emotional. (Those must have been some of the very earliest moving-picture images ever recorded in British Columbia?)

The museum exhibited so many pieces of evidence of the cultural genocide enacted against these people, including a reproduction of a document many of them were forced to sign attesting to the fact that they had become "Christians," would forever foreswear their traditional practices, and give no safe haven to anyone who continued to practice them.

... The main reason I came here, though, was to participate in the inaugural Board Meeting of a body called the Global Partnership for the International University of Iraq. It's a group that I've been involved with for 2-3 years now. But only now-- today, in fact-- has the organization become properly constituted under (Canadian) law.

It is such a wonderful project! And it was a huge pleasure and honor to meet and sit down to work with the other people involved. I'll tell you more about the people and the project, later. Let me just say, now, that it's very important to me that it's an determinedly international effort to work with Iraqis to build a university in Iraq (when circumstances permit) that embodies the highest qualities of academic freedom, great pedagogy, and socially relevant learning and research.

Anyway, I'm really tired. If you want to learn some very interesting things about what's been going on in Iraq, I direct you Badger's recent postings on his "Missing Links" blog and the latest offering from Reidar Visser.

Buddhism as a force in China, too

The Chinese citizen Tang Danhong is a poet and film-maker who lives outside her country. (Read on to discover where.) She seems to be someone who takes Buddhist teachings, especially regarding nonviolence and reincarnation, very seriously. On March 21, she published an intriguing essay about the current tragedy of violence and counter-violence in Tibet. (Chinese here, English translation here.) The translation is titled Tibet: Her pain, my shame.

Hat-tip to Tim Johnson of "China Rises." See his commentary on Tang's essay here.

Tang has apparently spent quite a lot of time in Tibet. Here is what she writes at what I consider the argumentational/emotional crux of her essay:

Why can’t we [i.e. the Han Chinese] sit down with the Dalai Lama who has abandoned calls for “independence” and now advocates a “middle way,” and negotiate with him with sincerity, to achieve “stability” and “unity” through him?

Because the power difference of the two sides is too big. We are too many people, too powerful: Other than guns and money, and cultural destruction and spiritual rape, we do not know other ways to achieve “harmony.”

……

Not long ago, I read some posts by some radical Tibetans on an online forum about Tibet. These posts were roughly saying: “We do not believe in Buddhism, we do not believe in karma. But we have not forgotten that we are Tibetan. We have not forgotten our homeland. Now we believe the philosophy of you Han Chinese: Power comes out of the barrel of a gun! Why did you Han Chinese come to Tibet? Tibet belongs to Tibetans. Get out of Tibet!”

Of course behind those posts, there are an overwhelming number of posts from Han “ patriots.” Almost without exception, those replies are full of words such as “Kill them!” “Wipe them out!” “Wash them with blood!” “Dalai is a liar!” — those “passions” of the worshippers of violence that we are all so familiar with.

When I read these posts, I feel so sad. So this is karma. ……

And here is what she writes at the end:

Tibet is disappearing. The spirit which makes her beautiful and peaceful is disappearing. She is becoming us, becoming what she does not want to become. What other choice does she have when facing the anxiety of being alienated? To hold onto her tradition and culture, and revive her ancient civilization? Or to commit suicidal acts which will only add to Han nationalists’ bloody, shameful glory?

Yes, I love Tibet. I am a Han Chinese who loves Tibet, regardless of whether she is a nation or a province, as long as she is so voluntarily. Personally, I would like to have them (Tibetans) belong to the same big family with me. I embrace relationships which come self-selected and on equal footing, not controlled or forced, both between peoples and nations. I have no interest in feeling “powerful,” to make others fear you and be forced to obey you, both between people and between nations, because what’s behind such a “feeling” is truly disgusting. I have left her (Tibet) several years ago, and missing her has become part of my daily life. I long to go back to Tibet, as a welcomed Han Chinese, to enjoy a real friendship as equal neighbor or a family member.

The fact that there are ethnic-Han Chinese who are Buddhists and who have respect and affection for Tibetan Buddhism is one that is too often ignored in the west. As is the fact that some of the nationalists in the Tibetan diaspora advocate the use of violent means; some are considerably more hard-line than the Dalai Lama, seeking full independence instead of-- as he demands-- real autonomy for Tibet as a part of the Chinese state; and some are harshly and openly critical of the Dalai Lama on many counts.

When I was in Beijing in April 2004, I learned a lot about the complex links that had grown up in earlier centuries between the dominant culture in imperial China and Tibetan Buddhism. (You could almost compare it to the appropriation by the conquering "west" of that very specifically Palestinian-origined-- though intentionally "universal"-- religion, Christianity... And there, too, many of the appropriators, having taken what they want from the appropriated culture and teachings, turn round to spit on and excoriate the earliest communities of believers, the indigenous Christians of Palestine and its neighboring countries.) And modern China also has its own very complex relationship with the memories and norms of imperial China-- nowhere near as dismissive and "we can completely make the whole country over as if from nothing" as in the days of Mao's Cultural revolution.

Thus, between today's Han Chinese and today's Tibetan Buddhists there are long skeins of historic affinities, of old pleasures and old resentments-- in short, of relationship-- that are considerably more tangled and interesting than the simple manichean view too often portrayed in the west.

I also recall that when I had the huge pleasure of working on my 2000 book The Moral Architecture of World Peace, one of the key points the Dalai Lama made in the conference on which the book was based was that he strongly valued anything Americans could do to help inform Han Chinese about Tibetan Buddhist culture.(p/102.)

But back to Tang Danhong... At the bottom of the "China Digital Times" English translation of her essay it tells us that she "moved to Israel from Chengdu in 2005, and [is] currently teaching Chinese language in Tel Aviv University." It would be so fascinating to talk to her! Do you think she speaks English? Can any JWN readers get contact information for her, for me? (If so, send it here.) I would love to know how she would compare the Israel-Palestine situation to the China-Tibet situation. You might recall I wrote some of my own thoughts on the matter here.

Messaging chaos from Washington, Fateh, on Hamas issue

Sorry I've been very busy and haven't had a moment to catch you all up with the fascinating saga of the Fateh-Hamas negotiations in Sana'a, Yemen...

Al-Jazeera English tells us that negotiators Azzam al-Ahmed (F) and Mousa Abu Marzouk (H) concluded a seven-point deal on Saturday (March 22), though the signing ceremony was on Sunday.

The AJE report tells us it was a seven-point agreement, and presents it to us as such, though sadly it lists only these SIX points:

• Gaza must be returned to how it was prior to the Hamas takeover last June

• Agreement to hold early elections

• Resumption of dialogue on the basis of the 2005 Cairo agreement and the Mecca agreement of 2007

• Respecting the Palestinian Law and Basic Law and adherence to it by all parties

• Reconstruction of the Palestinian security institutions

• All Palestinian institutions to be free of any factional discrimination, subject to the law and the executive authorities.

Well, seven points or six points-- almost immediately after agreement was announced, some people in Abu Mazen's office denounced and repudiated it. This, though Azzam Ahmed is a serious political figure within Fateh. Monsters & Critics tells us that Abu Mazen aide Nimr Hammad huffed that Ahmed "had not been authorized" to sign the Sana'a Agreement. Israel's Y-net News had a quote from Abu Mazen aide Yasser Abed Rabboo criticizing Ahmed, too.

That latter report, which I think was an AP report, quoted Abu Ala' (Ahmed Qurei') as saying that Azzam Ahmed had been trying to get through to Abu Mazen by phone to discuss some fine points in the agreement but couldn't because Abu Mazen was busy meeting with-- you guessed it, Dick Cheney, at the time.

So this is where the picture becomes a little clearer for me. Cheney and Condi Rice have, after all, been modeling for their eager students and proteges in Fateh just how to 'run' a diplomatic effort through legerdemain and completely chaotic messaging.

Remember how, earlier this month, the secretary of State was in Brussels telling a press conference that she supported Egypt's efforts to mediate a ceasefire-plus agreement between Israel and Hamas?

Well, now, apparently Cheney's gone to the Middle East to say the administration doesn't support any effort to engage with Hamas, after all.

If the Israeli government wants a deal with Hamas, I am sure it will just go ahead and nail one down, Dick Cheney or no Dick Cheney. In Tuesday's Ha'aretz, Amos Harel and Yuval Azoulay tell us that an Egypt-mediated "calm for calm" situation has been generally holding for some days now across the Gaza-Israel border. Or rather, that Hamas and Israel are abiding by it, "even though Islamic Jihad occasionally launches rockets into Israel."

Other portions of that report indicate that some people in the Israeli Defense Ministry are pursuing an intense campaign to "lower expectations" about any kind of more solid ceasefire emerging with Gaza. But if Hamas does succeed in keeping the Gaza-Israel border calm (i.e. no rockets), what would be the justification for Israel's continued maintenance of the siege?

NYT is only 13 days behind JWN on the Hamas-Israel story

The NYT's handsomely compensated diplomatic reporter Helene Cooper is "only" 13 days behind Just World News in reporting that Egypt has gotten some support from the US State Department in its continuing efforts to negotiate an Israel-Hamas ceasefire.

Strengths of my reporting over hers:

1. I had a reference and a link to the extremely revealing comment Rice made in a March 6 press conference in Brussels, when she said she "had talked to the Egyptian leaders and expressed confidence that their efforts could promote the US-backed peace talks." I also linked to the AFP report that spelled out that Rice's remarks were in response to a question "about reported talks between Cairo and Palestinian groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad." Cooper made no mention of this at all, though it was the most public (even if still slightly guarded) expression of support any administration official has ever made for the Israel-Hamas negotiations, and was therefore key to her story. And it's all there in the public record!

2. I had links and references to some excellent reporting by Al-Masry al-Yawm's Fathiya Dakhakhni that spelled out Hamas's negotiating position in some detail. Cooper seemingly couldn't give a toss.

3. I explored in some detail Egypt's reasons for undertaking this mediating role despite the considerable reservations that President Mubarak entertains towards Hamas. (With lots of hyperlinks.) No toss here from Cooper, either.

4. I scooped her by 13 days.

Strengths of her reporting over mine:

1. She wrote her piece after mine and therefore was able to incorporate into it the whole "story" about the trouble the State Department got into by publishing on a sort of "quasi-official" blog a question about whether the US government should seek to "engage" Hamas, and the furious response that elicited from a Congressman who's on the House Appropriations Committee and expressed outrage that the question had even been asked. (The State Dept spokesman rapidly put up a comment to the effect that they were merely asking the question, not defining policy.)

2. She got direct quotes from two Israelis who have been in Washington and support the idea of engaging with Hamas. (I could have gotten those quotes but I've been busy with a bunch of other things, as attentive readers will be aware.)

3. She got paid for her work on this story. (H'mm, I'm not actually sure if this makes her work better or not. Probably it's a wash.)

One intriguing thing that is underlined yet again by Cooper's story is the extreme difficulty any US administration will always have even talking about thinking about engaging with Hamas-- unless the Government of Israel has already done so first.

This is so like the whole story of the PLO back in the 1980s and early 1990s! Back then, it was the Norwegians, bless their dear misguided hearts, who did the preparatory intermediation. Nowadays its the Egyptians. I actually explored some of the strange and-- from the American point of view-- completely dysfunctional dimensions of that tail-wags-dog phenomenon in my article in The Nation last November.

Maybe Helene Cooper could helpfully go read that one, too?

Bush's inflammatory and inaccurate accusations against Iran

On Wednesday-- the same day Dick Cheney was blowing off the recent, much less alarmist National Intelligence Estimate on Iran-- our president was making an audiotape to be broadcast into Iran in which he claimed, fallaciously, that Iran has "declared they want a nuclear weapon to destroy people" and that the Islamic Republic could be hiding a secret nuclear weapons program.

McClatchy's Jonathan Landay has written an excellent short analysis of this issue. Over at the WaPo, Robin Wright notes the escalatory potential of Bush's utterance. She quotes Iran specialist Suzanne Maloney, who worked at the State Department until recently, as saying that "The bellicose rhetoric from one side only produces the same from the other." Bush's rhetorical escalation has also been accompanied by further moves to tighten the sanction against Iranian financial institutions.

Bush seems to be in a strange (and to me very scary) kind of gung-ho-ish mood these days, one that seems far removed from the grim realities of a US military that is tautly over-stretched between Iraq and Afghanistan, a US diplomacy that is facing vast new problems, including crucally from its own NATO allies, and a US economy that is sputtering very seriously and threatened with further, even more explosive breakdown.

I am really wondering what is causing his present mood of apparent elation. Worrying, too, about what disasters it might lead us all into.

By the way, happy Nowruz, happy Easter, and happy Passover-- oops, sorry, make that Purim--, everyone. (If you celebrate a feast at this time of year that I haven't mentioned, happy that, too. As for us Quakers, we don't have a liturgical calendar so we just get to appreciate the passage of the seasons on this beautiful earth. May we find a way to save it, and ourselves-- including from any further terrible wars.)

New book, 'Re-engage' goes to press; website launched!

So here we are! The great folks at Paradigm Publishers told me my upcoming book Re-engage! America and the World After Bush went to press today-- and we are now also launching the website for the book.

Here's the cover:

And here's the website for it.

It has been a thrilling project. Two weeks ago I got to hold a copy of "bound galleys" in my hand, and all the work and the crazy deadlines seemed worthwhile... That, even though the bound galleys were not yet the final version of the book. The cover looks a lot stronger now; the layout of the book's 20 or so charts has been upgraded; the remaining typos have all (we hope) now been corrected; and various other small tweaks made.

It has been just a little over nine months since I first had the conversation with Jennifer Knerr and her colleagues at Paradigm that set the whole project in train. They have done a superb job-- in editing, in production, in speed, vision, and every other respect.

The cover price is $14.95 and the official publication date is May 15. However, if they really have gone to press today then I imagine that finished copies should be available much sooner than that.

So okay, JWN readers, here's where I would really love your help-- especially if you live in the United States. Can I ask you to help us promote the book??

This is fairly urgent. The book will be out very soon now, and given the topic its optimal shelf-life may be fairly short: let's say somewhere between nine and 18 months.

It has been written and produced to be as topical and up-to-date as possible. That means we need to hit the ground running promotion-wise. And I've a confession to make: I've been so busy writing and revising the book that I haven't yet done as much as I'd wanted to, to set up promotion activities for it. Paradigm and the Friends Committee on National Legislation will be helping, but neither of them have the kind of deep pockets that the big New York publishing houses put into promoting their books. And anyway, this is much more of a citizen-based, grassroots venture.

So here are some ideas of how you could help us out with this:

* You can order a copy of the book (instructions at the second button down on the website's left sidebar.)

* Or you could consider ordering three or four copies-- they make great gifts for anyone you know who's graduating high school or college.

* Could you go to your local bookstore and tell them how excited you are about the book? If you do, take in a couple of the fliers for the book, that you can download and print from the website. Order your own copy or copies of Re-engage! through the bookstore-- and urge the bookstore to get in a load of additional copies, too.

* While you're about it, you could print up a bunch of fliers and use them to help tell your friends and neighbors about the book...

* Would you like me to come to your town or community and gives some talks or speeches about the book? We are just working on some book-tour ideas right now. Best plan: scratch your head and think of as many local groups, colleges, organizations, and media outlets as may be interested in having me do something for them-- any time between May and the end of the year. See if any of these groups could help with airfare or other expenses. Coordinate with my schedule early on. (Email me here.) I'm definitely thinking of doing a west coast tour in early fall... maybe try to hit Chicago and some midwest cities in mid-fall... and just about anywhere on the east coast is easy for me to get to in spring, summer, or fall.

* Could you write a review of the book for any media outlet with which you're connected? Mention it in a Letter to the Editor?

* Of course, if you have a blog, or contribute to online discussions elsewhere, it would be great to get the book mentioned and discussed in the blogosphere as often as possible!

Well, y'all must have some other good ideas of how to get the word out, too...

By the way, the 'Re-engage' website has its own little blog attached to it over there. I'm not sure how much of my blogging I'll be doing over there in the months ahead, and how much here. But check it out. I'm looking forward to having some good discussions over there, too.

But mainly, at this point-- a big thanks for anything you can do to help get the work out about Re-engage! When you've had a chance to read it I'll be really interested to hear your reactions.

(For now, though, at least you can go to the website and admire the fine set of blurbs the book has gotten from some very interesting people who have read it. Did I mention Lee Hamilton???)

Problems inside Egypt's ruling party?

Egypt's landmark local elections are coming up April 8. As noted in my 'Delicious' comments over recent weeks, the Mubarak regime has gone to great lengths to prevent representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood and other opposition parties from registering as candidates. This Reuters report quotes MB leaders as saying that only 498 of the 5,754 candidates they had tried to register had been able to do so. You can get further details of the official obstructionism here.

Not all is wonderful for the ruling "National Democratic Party", either. Indeed, it seems to be suffering from an advanced attack of what we might call "Fateh-style internal collapse syndrome." Just today, Al-Masry al-Yawm reports that:

-- There has been considerable turmoil within the NDP in various areas, over the choices made for which candidates to run in the elections. Including this:

Party members in Zarqa, Damietta and Kafr Saad started to collect signatures to withdraw confidence from Secretaries Nabil el-Daly, Mansour Atwa and Essam el-Sharaydi for ignoring prominent figures and replacing them with others, which they called clear favoritism...

NDP Shura Council Member Magdy el-Sonbati has resigned in protest against ignoring his choices.

In Aswan, 50 NDP members staged a sit-in at the party headquarters in protest against the party's choices. They demanded the dismissal of Secretary Said Khalaf and Organization Secretary Refaat Abdallah...


--In Beheira and Dakahlia unrest among younger members of the NDP has erupted into a full-blown insurrection, with some recent university graduates announcing the formation of an "NDP Salvation Front."

-- There is more on the crisis of resignations within the NDP, here.

-- The NDP in el-Salam suddenly realized-- and this was after the deadline for registering candidacies-- it had failed to register enough candidates there (!) and that two MB candidates were about to be elected unopposed there... so they quickly (and not entirely legally) threw ten more NDP candidates into that race.

I vividly recall an evening when we were in Egypt last year, when we were being hosted by an old friend who is a leading figure within the NDP; and I said to him, "You know, I would love to know what it is that the NDP stands for?" And his only answer was a dismissive, though jolly, laugh. The NDP seems, like Fateh, to have become little more than an (increasingly creaky) patronage machine... And in a time of mounting socioeconomic and political challenges in Egypt, that may no longer be sufficient.

The war anniversary: a poignant Iraqi view

McClatchy Baghdad bureau's Correspondent Jenan has blogged what may be the most heart-rending short essay by any Iraqi anywhere on the fifth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq.

In four short paragraphs she sums up the strength of the desire she had, on March 18, 2003, for what she actually calls "salvation" from Saddam, and the depth of her disappointment now, five years later:

Really I can say I was flying with my great expectation of what will happen tomorrow. I wasn’t wait war. I was waiting for new life that fills with justice, fair, happy, hopes and love. I was waiting for the war of change. Even I vowed to God sacrifice sheep if we get rid of Saddam occupation of Iraq that what we believe at that time we were living under Saddam's occupation. I was happy, exciting, and optimist. Yes I was optimist at that time. I believed all the pretexts of war because I was look like the drowned who is cling to a straw thinking that it will save him.

Unfortunately now I feel that I’m drowning more and more. I discovered that I was deceived and now I believe the old saying “the devil that you know is better than the devil that you don’t know”

Jenan, I wish I could tell you that better days are coming. More peaceful days. Your dignity restored. A time when you and your family can live in security and in harmony with your compatriots and neighbors. A day free of occupation by any military force, whether homegrown or imposed by foreigners.

Well, honestly, I do believe we can bring such days to Iraqis. But only if all of us, Iraqis and non-Iraqis but most especially Americans, focus on the true goal: Days of dignity, calm, and hope. Days marked by friendly cooperation among all nations rather than the attempt by any one or more nations to exercise brute force and tight control over others.

Obama's speech confirms his leadership qualities

Today, in the (Quaker-founded) City of Brotherly Love, Sen. Barack Obama gave what is probably the most important speech of his entire presidential campaign. It was wise, thoughtful, honest, redemptive, hope-filled, and intensely focused on the central issue of his campaign: the need to bring the US citizenry together in the search for a more just social order.

The speech confirmed, for me, that Obama does indeed have the wisdom required to lead this nation in the complex years ahead.

The main challenge he was confronting in making the speech was the way that race issues have started infiltrating into the Democratic nomination race in a very insidious way. There were Geraldine's Ferraro's (actually quite bizarre) recent comments to the effect that Obama had gotten as far as he has gotten only because of his race; and there has been much muttering and dissemination of anti-Obama innuendo based on video clips of some sermons given by his long-time pastor in Chicago, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Wright retired some time ago from the pastroship at Obama's church and is no longer his pastor.

Obama dealt in what I thought was a fair-minded, clear, yet generous-spirited way with the issues raised by and about both Ferraro and Wright. Regarding Wright, Obama went to some lengths to express his strong criticism of some of the specific things Wright has said (and therefore, done), while notably not disaffirming him totally as a person, a valued former mentor, and a friend.

To me, this is a very important move for anyone to make. People need to be able to criticize the actions (or words) of other people without disaffirming them as people. We certainly all need to the hold to the idea that people, all people, including ourselves, are capable of doing both good things and bad things; (and we should hope that we ourselves end up doing more good than bad.)

Obama spoke quite a lot about what Wright and his UCC church have meant to him over the years. He also, as I've said, criticized some of Wright's specific utterances. Then, he paired this view of Wright, and Wright's occasional (but, it turns out, well documented) explosions of anti-white anger, with his view of his own white grandmother. He says of Wright:

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love...

This is indeed a fascinating look into what makes Obama tick. In essence, because of the multiracial character of his upbringing and his family, Obama has an "insider's view" into the way that many white Americans talk among themselves about race issues, and of the way that many black Americans talk among themselves. Within each community, these are generally viewed as "dirty little secrets." But keeping them secret rather than airing and discussing these fears, concerns, and accusations more openly has allowed them to fester.

He promises us something different. More honesty, more national unity, and more focus on the many very urgent tasks of social (re-)building that our country faces at the twilight of the George W. Bush years.

This is an amazing and important speech. The only small flaw-- a concession, no doubt, to the problems that many strongly pro-Likud people have been foisting onto him-- was his specific disavowal of an argument that Rev. Wright apparently made, to the effect that the conflicts in the Middle East have been rooted primarily in the actions of Israel (described by Obama as a "stalwart ally"--"instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam."

Well, my view is that the actions of Israel and the hateful ideologies of some (but not all) of the proponents of radical Islam have both contributed to the conflicts in the Middle East. And so, in an even greater way, have the actions of the US government. So Obama's flaw there doesn't seem major to me.

His speech is primarily about inter-group relations here in the U.S. It is a great one.

Adventures of the neoconquistadores

Last week, the Pentagon contractors at the "Institute for Defense Analyses" published a scrubbed-for-public-view version (here in PDF) of their report on the links between Saddam Hussein's regime and international terrorism. It was based overwhelmingly on documents captured after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq that was, we can recall, justified by the Bush administration on the two main grounds that (1) the Iraqi regime had a significant arsenal of WMDs, and (2) the regime had significant ties to Al-Qaeda.

War justification #1 turned out to have no basis in fact.

Many of us had argued all along (as I did here, back in February 2003) that War justification #2 had no basis in fact, either.

Now, the Pentagon and its contractor have confirmed our judgment. The IDA report stated (p.ES-1) that: "This study found no 'smoking gun' (i.e., direct connection) between Saddam's Iraq and al Qaeda."

But, and this is a big "but"-- it went on to add: "The Iraqi regime was involved in regional and international terrorist operations prior to OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM. The predominant targets of Iraqi state terror operations were Iraqi citizens, both inside and outside of Iraq."

President Bush was fast to seize on this new formulation, and a day or so after the IDA report surfaced he made a speech claiming that the US invasion of Iraq had in fact been justified because of the "state terror" that Saddam had perpetrated against his own citizens. Thus, the concept of "state terror" was handily conscripted there to shift the conversation from Saddam's alleged "links with al-Qaeda" to his regime's abusive treatment of its own citizens.

Now, it is indubitably true that Saddam Hussein perpetrated numerous atrocities against his own people. Those fell under the headings of both crimes against humanity and, most likely, genocide. To call them "terrorism" is probably to stretch the definition of "terrorism" further than it should be stretched. Anyway, in international law "crimes against humanity" and "genocide" are far more useful categories.

I note that many US allies have also committed such acts against their own people-- in Central America, in the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere.

Indeed, when Saddam was committing the worst of his acts against Iraq's Kurdish citizens, in the 1980s, he was acting in an informal but but very real alliance with the US. (That was when Donald Rumsfeld made his visit to Iraq.) But by early 2003, Saddam's regime had become tightly overstretched as a result of 12 years of extremely punishing US-led sanctions imposed on the people and government of Iraq; and his regime was probably the least abusive it had ever been.

But now, as the fifth anniversary of the invasion approaches, Bush presents us with this "liberationist" description of what the invasion was all about.

The first time a western government decided to use the force of arms to invade and "remake" to its own design a non-western country, and justified this act as being completely "in the true [i.e. invader-defined] interests of the invaded peoples" was when Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella sent Christopher Columbus west to "remake" as much of the newly discovered "New World" of the Americas as he could reach.

From that perspective, the key development was not in 1492 when Columbus made landfall on the Caribbean island he named "Hispaniola", thinking at the time that he had already reached Asia. It was when Ferdinand and Isabella sent him back to Hispaniola the following year, to govern it just as he pleased. (Details here.)

Columbus turned out to be a lousy administrator-- perhaps because he used wanton violence against Hispaniola's indigenous Tainos people, reducing their numbers in just a few years from "hundreds of thousands" to around 60,000.

Two decades later, further generations of (better organized) Conquistadores launched their "liberationist" projects on the mainland of Central and North-Central America. This time they were better backed up by cohorts of Dominicans and other "cultural genocidaires" whose job was to remake the peoples of Central America as Spanish-style Catholics who would always be obedient to the diktats of the (Spanish-dominated) Catholic hierarchy.

The means the Conquistadores used to bring about their "conversions"-- which of course were always described as being "for the good of the natives themselves"-- were the time-honored means that colonial invaders always use: brute violence, divide-and-rule, and the spreading of both weapons and distrust. Including, many of the same means the Dominicans were using back home in Spain in their Inquisition against suspected unbelievers there.

Well, at least now we can have a richer idea of what the "con" in the word "neocon" stands for. But I still feel fairly sickened whenever I hear President Bush or other gung-ho supporters of the bloody and so destructive invasion of Iraq appropriating the noble discourse of "liberation" and trying to justify the invasion on those grounds.

Perhaps I should get over just feeling sickened by this, and try harder to really understand that Bush and his supporters probably do, in all seriousness, still feel that they have done "a good thing" in Iraq. How, then, can we get into a conversation with such people and point out to them, in a way that "works", that noble though their intentions may have been, the effects of their actions have been very far indeed from the meliorist project they might have had in mind... And that therefore, they should be much more open than they have been thus far to ideas for Iraq other than just going ahead blindly with the application of continuing amounts of military force?

Five years of the US war in Iraq

It is so tragic to realize that just about all the dire predictions I made in 2002 and early 2003 about the consequences of a US invasion of Iraq have been fulfilled-- and then some. So many of us worked so hard to try to avert that quite foreseeable and indeed foreseen disaster.

The harmful effects of this war on the peoples of Iraq and the Middle East are still continuing, day after day after day. And they will continue so long as the US military continues to stay there, continually sowing its seeds of divide-and-rule and distrust, and continually pumping into the country both military tools and a militarized mindset. The moment a US President states clearly that he or she intends to pull the US troops out of Iraq completely, defines the timetable within which s/he will achieve that, and calls on the UN to convene the negotiating processes-- at the intra-Iraqi level, and at the regional level-- required for this to happen in a calm and orderly way, then the dynamic in the country and in the region will change.

It is quite unrealistic (and therefore quite dishonest) for any US leader or official to claim at this point that the US on its own can "control" the modalities of its own exit. But exit there must be-- primarily for the good of the Iraqis, whose sufferings over the past five years have been vast; but also for the good of the US and for many other actors.

If this whole, grisly tragedy has had a "silver lining"-- and I hesitate even to raise the idea this might be so-- then that is that surely it has amply demonstrated to the US citizenry and the world, once again, that military power on its own, however technically "awesome" (and shocking), is in the modern world quite insufficient as a means to securing strategic goals of any significance.

I had hoped that US citizens might have learned this from the war they waged on Vietnam in earklier decades? Or from the outcome of Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon? But no. The curve of learning of actual, useful strategic lessons-- as opposed to those that are handily "packaged" in Power Point slideshows by the arms manufacturers and their armies of well-paid cheerleaders in the think-tanks and academe-- seems notably flat, or perhaps even downward-trending over time.

That is tragic. But let's try to make sure that this time around, the "Lessons from the failure of US military power in Iraq" are properly learned and properly (and irreversably) integrated into the practice and planning of the US government. That is: we need a drastic redirection of resources from military hardware, military "preparedness", and global power-projection capabilities into supporting all the many tools of diplomacy and international cooperation that already exist, and some new ones that we should now work with the rest of the world to build from scratch.

We Americans certainly need to have a big and ongoing national conversation about these matters in the months ahead. My book, Re-engage! America and the World After Bush addresses them, and will be published on May 15. (The website associated with the book, which has order forms for it and a lot of associated information, will be published within the next couple of days... Watch this space for the announcement.)

But as our Black Iraqiversary approaches again this year, I think we should all make an effort to showcase and engage with what Iraq's citizens themselves feel about the occasion, and about their current situation.

Here is a short, tautly ironic commentary from "Correspondent Laith" oin McClatchy's "Inside Iraq" blog today. It starts off thus:

In the few coming days, we will say good bye to the fifth year since freedom and liberation visited Iraq . For this great anniversary, I want to count some great democratic changes that happened during the five years of freedom and democracy.
1- The most important change is killing and displacing more than three million Iraqis. I think the record of Saddam had been broken long time ago. Now we have Iraqis all over the world even in some places that I never heard about till this moment...

Here is how the International Committee of the Red Cross describes the humanitarian crisis that Iraq is experiencing:

Five years after the outbreak of the war in Iraq, the humanitarian situation in most of the country remains among the most critical in the world. Because of the conflict, millions of Iraqis have insufficient access to clean water, sanitation and health care. The current crisis is exacerbated by the lasting effects of previous armed conflicts and years of economic sanctions.
Despite limited improvements in security in some areas, armed violence is still having a disastrous impact. Civilians continue to be killed in the hostilities. The injured often do not receive adequate medical care. Millions of people have been forced to rely on insufficient supplies of poor-quality water as water and sewage systems suffer from a lack of maintenance and a shortage of engineers.

The ICRC website also has many other useful resources on the humanitarian situation inside Iraq. Among them is this short recollection by Roland Huguenin, who was spokesman for the ICRC delegation in Baghdad in March 2003.

Tibet as Gaza?

China Hand has an informative post on his blog about the current disturbances/uprising in Tibet. Talking about the Tibetan Popular Uprising Movement which seems to have coordinated the pro-independence activities that have been taking place around the world-- but most especially inside the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) of China-- he asks:

what is TPUM thinking?

Did they want to provoke a crackdown that would create a groundswell of Western support for boycotting the Beijing Olympics?

Certainly, if anti-Han activism in Tibet and abroad turns the Olympics into a humiliating diplomatic and public security ordeal, instead of a triumphant coming-out party, the Chinese are going to take out their frustrations on dissent in Tibet.

Assuming that Tibet Uprising has thought this thing through, the conclusion would be that they are consciously trying to elicit Chinese over-reaction, exacerbate the crackdown, and alienate more and more Tibetans from the idea of accommodation with the PRC.

In other words, think of Tibet as the new Gaza.

The occupying power games the political/diplomatic system to counter criticism, but relentlessly extends its military and economic reach inside the territory. The occupied turn to militancy. They attempt to create an atmosphere of intense bitterness and anger on the ground through direct action and by the creation of a new generation of militants in religious schools.

The objective is to marginalize moderate and co-optable forces, make a successful occupation impossible militarily, politically, and socially, and finally compel the oppressor to give up and withdraw.

An interesting idea, except it hasn’t worked in Gaza, even with sub rosa aid from Iran.

With the Tibet independence forces actively opposed by India and the United States and just about every other government I can think of, I wouldn’t think that such an approach would succeed in Tibet.

Well, it is true that Gaza has not yet gained independence from Israel's economic shackles, but that might well be achieved sometime within the next year...

There are, of course, numerous similarities and some differences between the situation of the Palestinians and that of the Tibetans.

One big similarity: the longing for "home" among the many Tibetans exiled outside their ancestral homeland. (One difference: the breadth and centrality that the idea of organizing an exiles' march to back their homeland has in the planning of the new generation of Tibetan activists.)

One evident difference is the position on these respective issues adopted by "the west", in general. Westerners tend to be very supportive of Israel vs. the Palestinians; and supportive of Tibetans vs. China. (The relative weight of "the west" in world affairs is declining; but it is still an important factor.) Another difference, in my view, is that at the cultural level, many Han Chinese have real affection and veneration for Tibetan Buddhism as part of their own cultural heritage, while most Jewish Israelis tend to be dismissive, hostile, or extremely denigrating toward Islam as a religion. In China/Tibet, Buddhism in general has the potential to be a bridge between the two contesting national groups. In Israel/Palestine, no such supranational cultural bridge easily suggests itself.

Another difference: right now, Israel is not seeking to swallow up Gaza into Greater Israel and totally assimilate its indigenous residents, as China is in Tibet. In fact, Israel has never sought to assimilate the indigenous residents of any of the Arab lands it has occupied. Instead, it has strongly preferred either to expel them directly, or to make their life so constrained and miserable that they leave.

At the territorial level, though, the better analogy of the territorial expansion of China's zone of exclusive control is not with Gaza, but with the West Bank. It is into the West Bank that Israel is currently pumping thousands of new colonial settlers each year; giving them preferential treatment in many economic spheres; and skewing land-use and infrastructure planning totally in favor of their interests-- as China has been doing, with its and for its own ethnic settlers, in Tibet.

In terms of the demographic balance, if it comes to a total showdown-- which I certainly believe the Chinese authorities want to avoid-- or a longterm contest by attrition, then the four million or so Tibetans are a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the billion-plus Han Chinese; while the eight million Palestinians living in and near to the area of Mandate Palestine outnumber the six million Jewish Israelis.

I think Beijing has many, many potential options to divide-and-rule the Tibetans that they have not explored fully yet. One extremely smart move for them would be to make some non-trivial concessions to the Dalai Lama and get him to return to Lhasa. Think: Oslo-- but one we would hope would work out.

It is worth underlining that-- as China Hand notes-- the Dalai Lama supports the idea of the TAR remaining an "Autonomous Region" under over-all Chinese sovereignty. He is not calling for complete Tibetan independence, though that is the goal that many of supporters in the west might prefer. Of course, the kind of autonomy he seeks is one that leaves the Tibetan Buddhists quite free to practice their own religion and run their own religious institutions. This includes the effective functioning of the Panchen Lama identified by the Tibetan Lama-ate itself, rather than the young man "named" as the Panchen Lama by the Chinese authorities and kept under their sway in Beijing.

The Dalai Lama would probably also require that Tibetans in the TAR be allowed to regulate matters of residence and land-purchasing inside the TAR (to protect themselves from any further uncontrolled influx of Han Chinese) and that they be allowed to regulate many other aspects of the TAR's economic development at the TAR level, rather than having economic "plans" forced onto them by Beijing.

Honestly, with goodwill I believe these matters could be negotiated relatively easily.

One big reason why this should be more possible today than, say, 40 years ago, is that China's relations with India are far less tense now than they were then, so the military sensitivity of Tibet, and the fears Beijing may once have had that this distant province might act as a welcoming place for the activities of pro-Indian (anti-Chinese) Fifth Columnists should be a lot less intense than they were then.

Interesting and significant, I think, to see how harshly the Indian authorities seem to have been cracking down on the TPUM people who've been trying to organize the "long march" from Daramsala to the border with Tibet.

Of course, Beijing also has extremely ambivalent ideas toward the idea of Tibetan spirituality... Quite a hefty residual heritage of Han Chinese respect for Tibetan Buddhism, yes, as I noted above, but also quite a lot of "Communist"- oriented fears of anything that resembles organized religion.

Chinese officials have, however, expressed concerns in recent years that their younger generations have quite insufficient moral grounding/ moral education; and there has been some open-ness to allowing Buddhist teachers (and even some Christian teachers) to provide this in some cases. But mainly, what Beijing wants to avoid-- as in their crackdown on the Falun Gong-- is the consolidation of any forms of organized nationwide networks that are not under the CCP's exclusive control... So maybe in the context of a Dalai Lama-Beijing agreement, the DL would have to promise not to undertake any "evangelizing" or build/support any forms of his own religious networks in areas of China outside the TAR.

Anyway, I am largely speculating, for now, about the possibilities of a DL-Beijing deal. I need to speak to a couple of good friends who know a lot more about this than I do; and then maybe I'll be able to write something more about the topic here. But I would just note that it is not nearly as unthinkable a prospect as many of the diehard pro-Tibet people in the west seem to think.

Palestinian 'Contras'-training plan in chaos

The plan hatched by Condi Rice and Elliott Abrams to train up a Palestinian 'Contras'-style force under the auspices of Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) has fallen into a significant degree of chaos. The WaPo's Ellen Knickmeyer and Glenn Kessler went to Muwaqqar, Jordan, where some 1,050 Palestinian security men are supposed to be being trained, and this is what they reported:

Weeks into the course, which began in late January, U.S. and Jordanian instructors had yet to receive essential training equipment, including vehicles, two-way radios, dummy pistols, rifles and batons, and a U.S.-designed curriculum, Americans with close knowledge of the program said. Because of Israeli concerns, the group of more than 1,000 Palestinian trainees has not been outfitted with pledged body armor or light-armored personnel carriers. The shortages and delays have forced U.S. and Jordanian trainers to improvise their way through the program, including purchasing pistol-shaped cigarette lighters for use in arrest drills and using their own cars for driver training. One of the Americans said, "In short, we are faking it."

Read the whole thing. Many of the details are hilarious and/or tragic, depending how you look at them.

I think the most tragic aspect is that the trainees are probably destitute Palestinians from the diaspora-- perhaps from Jordan, or perhaps some of the scores of thousands of Palestinians summarily kicked out of Iraq... And maybe they were so ill-educated or ignorant that when they signed on they thought they were doing something glorious and nationalistic? Or maybe for some of them this was the only way they could figure out how to get back home to their homeland?

So there is, certainly, a tragic personal aspect to the story. The politics, however, are almost pure farce.

Basically, the pro-Likud people and other Arabophobes in the U.S. Congress-- that means, quite a large proportion of the members-- can't imagine trusting Israel's Palestinian "partners" in Fateh enough to give them even decent flak jackets or other basic equipment for gendarmerie-type training.... And then there's the ever-present "contractor", in this case DynCorp, who no doubt is eager to skim off its high percentage from the deal. So the training sounds as though it's nonsense: the Contras meet the Keystone Cops sort of thing.

Knickmeyer and Kessler note that,

The courses here are the first extended training of Palestinian recruits since June, when hundreds of Fatah graduates of a U.S.-backed, 45-day crash course conducted in Egypt were deployed against Hamas fighters in Gaza.

Hamas routed the Fatah forces in the strip in five days, leaving Hamas in charge of Gaza and Abbas, a Fatah leader, governing the West Bank.

It is extremely uncertain whether these latest 1,050 trainees would do any better.

Look, I have a suggestion. Israel does actually need a Palestinian "partner for peace." That is, it needs a Palestinian party or movement or administration that is capable of preserving calm on the Palestinian side and reining in the many thousands of Palestinians who have been driven towards rash and violent acts by the degree of horrendous suffering that the IOF has inflicted on them and their families. And Hamas does look as if it has been paying a lot of attention precisely to building up such forces, especially in Gaza... (Remember that Crisis Group report that gave many details about how internal political and inter-clan violence in Gaza went down significantly after the Fateh forces left.)

Of course, no Palestinian force-- whether Fateh, or Hamas, or the Palestinian Boy Scouts-- could be expected to play the role of policing the Palestinian side of the equation without being offered its own serious stake in the situation thus being "secured."

But why all this money being shoveled to DynCorp to train Fateh's forces, when they have little hope of securing anything-- unless they do so in coordination with Hamas?

Well, the Likudist influence in Congress may not, in the end, prove to be a wholly bad thing. It's a strange old world we live in.

A journalistic war-dog reflects

Todd Pitman, whose name has bylined many of AP's stories out of Iraq over the past few years, has written a beautiful and reflective piece (also here) about the death-by-fire in May 2007 of his friend and colleague, the Russian news photog Dmitry Chebotayev, 29.

Pitman starts by describing nightmares that he still has about what he recalls happening in the immediate aftermath of Dmitry's killing, which took place in the midst of what sounds like a fierce fire-fight:

When the gunshots ease, I survey the scene nervously.

I circle around one body in particular: a man in a maroon shirt, lying face up. Carefully, deliberately, I take photo after photo, capturing it at different angles. The Stryker is just behind, shadowed by a large golden-domed mosque across the street. I think this is an Iraqi civilian in a dishdasha gown, perhaps one of the attackers.

I am expecting Dmitry to come running with his camera, but he does not appear. I think soldiers are keeping him back — photographing American casualties is often taboo.

Inside an abandoned house where we seek shelter, I ask where he is.

"Out front," a soldier says. "You OK?"

I am relieved, thankful.

I know we will share these stories later: a dangerous time, a brush with death, but we escaped unharmed.

Desperate to talk to Dmitry, I wander outside again. I still can't find him, and ask somebody else where he is.

Inside the house, a dozen red-eyed, mourning soldiers are sitting against the walls, staring angrily toward the harsh light outside.

Until this moment, I am an observer.

When a soldier answers, I become one of them.

I am numb.

Dmitry is outside on the ground near the door — the one wearing the maroon shirt. His blue flak jacket, helmet and sunglasses are gone. His smashed camera is on the ground beside him. His face is covered in dust.

When I gain the strength to go out and look, he is gone. Soldiers have carried him away.

Now I want to ask him: Can you forgive me taking your picture?

And I ask myself: Why was I taking his picture, any of these pictures, at all?

___

For a journalist, the world unfolds as an infinite stream of events. Your job is to witness them, capture them, explain them.

But they build up inside you.

I traveled to Iraq half a dozen times for the Associated Press over the years. I saw families crouching in their homes while Americans fought on their rooftops. I heard the screams of a dying Iraqi soldier as we crawled on a roof under a boiling midday sun. I watched helicopter gunships fire rockets across a twilit sky at insurgents holed up in palm groves below.

Unlike everybody else, I was always able to hop on a plane and leave it all behind, returning to a world where you did not cringe, where you could walk — not run — down the street, without worrying about trip wires or bombs or snipers.

I was always able to leave it all behind — until Dmitry was killed.

That day, I crossed through a kind of looking glass, and saw the war in Iraq from another side.

To the daily churn of news, it was just one more tragic story.

To me, it was far more profound. It reverberated through lives thousands of miles away, changing them forever.

I think about all the stories we have written — all the headlines and statistics that comprise the daily death tolls.

I do not look at them so casually anymore.

___

At the end of May, I traveled to Moscow for Dmitry's funeral and met his parents, sister and girlfriend.

They didn't really know what had happened, and telling them, between shots of ice-cold vodka, was one of the hardest things I have ever done. (Dmitry, it turned out, had never told his parents he was going to Iraq. They thought he was in Jordan, shooting pictures of refugees).

His death forced me to slow down my 100 mph life. In less than a year, I had traveled to Iraq twice, with 20 countries and a coup in Thailand in between.

My fiancee and I took a long vacation visiting family and friends, swimming with giant turtles in a sapphire-blue Hawaiian bay. We got married. And now she is pregnant with our baby boy.

I could not be happier — except when I think about what happened.

I have not returned to Iraq, but I've been back many times in my mind.

Often, I see Dmitry smiling.

Often, I see him dead.

In my dreams, I lean down and hold what is left of him. I do not care about the blood.

I press my forehead to his — as I did not have the chance to do — then tell him I am sorry, and say goodbye. It is important for me to recognize him, to treat him as a human being — not the object of a camera lens.

I take no pictures, and I am finally at ease.

But this is not a peaceful place.

Nearly a year later, I still wonder what we could have done differently. I feel stupid for seeking the war out. And I'm haunted by the words — "Be careful what you wish for" — that one soldier said to us the day before Dmitry died, as we resolved to go out with the Strykers again.

Now I am left with questions, memories and hundreds of digital photographs that I can no longer look at, that I cannot show anyone and cannot throw away. ..

Pitman asks some absolutely crucial questions about the role of journalists in war situations. I know, because for several years after I finished working as a war correspondent in Lebanon in the 1970s I suffered from several symptoms that today would be classified as PTSD. At times it was only, really, the grinding daily need to be there as the (single) mother for my kids that me going. (The therapeutic effects of folding a pile of laundry made up of small kids' clothes has never, I feel, been explored as deeply as it should have been.)

Journalists are trained to be professionally present in the most harrowing of situations while keeping their souls and their emotions absent from these situations. Actually, if you're in a stressful situation, then having something to do is certainly better than not having something to do. So chalk up going out there with a notebook and pen-- or, as in Pitman's case that night, a notebook, pen, and camera-- in the middle of a stressful situation as being another excellent coping mechanism, too.

But of course, as Pitman, Elizabeth Rubin, and a host of other fine war correspondents have discovered, you can't absent your emotions and your soul from these situations. They will come back and bite you later.

So I really admire, certainly, all the journalists who-- quite literally-- have put their lives on the line in order to tell the world about the grisly and horrendous realities of war. But I think I have special admiration for those who also take the huge professional and personal risk of trying to tell us what it feels like, to them, as they do so.

Thanks, Todd Pitman, for a great and sensitive writing job. I really sympathize about your loss of your friend.

Kissinger: "Talk to Iran"

Late Thursday night, Henry Kissinger gave an interview with Bloomberg TV, and the 13+ minute segment can be viewed via this link. Kissinger is reputed to be among US Presidential candidate John McCain's advisers, and he remains an icon among "realist" analytical circles.

I'll leave it to Helena Cobban or other sharp jwn readers to comment on the rest of his remarks. Kissinger, for example, sticks to the stale, if safe line that Israel cannot negotiate with Hamas until Hamas recognizes Israel's right to exist. Helena has well articulated a different view here repeatedly.

I am more struck by Kissinger's apparent "off the reservation" observations and counsel regarding US-Iran relations. His Iran remarks roughly come between minutes 3:30 and 7:30 of the recording. Here's a quick summary of his points, with my comments:

1. Kissinger sets out his working question, about whether Iran is a "nation" or a "cause." Presumably, we can deal with the former, but not so well with the latter. Kissinger (HAK) presumably finds Iran today to be more of a "nation," one with which we can be fellow "realists."

This is more than mere academic jargon. Neoconservative godfathers, from Bernard Lewis to Norman Podhoretz have been advancing the fallacious argument that Iran remains an irrational "cause." To Podhoretz (and his source Amir Taheri), never mind what the Islamic Republic says or offers, Iran will be an incorrigible "existential" threat to Israel, even unto "martyrdom." Kissinger, to his credit, sees other possibilities.

Funny thing, I first wrote about revolutionary Iran adapting to "reasons of state" back in early 1984 -- in a grad. school seminar. So glad the Secretary is catching up.

By the way, what is America under Bush - a nation, or a cause?

2. Kissinger supports "direct negotiations" with Iran. Yet he also supports what Secretary Rice thus far has offered, "to meet with Iranians anywhere, anytime." Kissinger claims that the problem hasn't been the willingness to talk, but the content, the agenda about which we might talk.

What's a neoconservative to make of this? On the one hand, Israel is not to talk to Hamas because it doesn't formally recognize Israel's right to exist. Yet the US can talk to Iran, never mind the incendiary remarks, shall we say, of its current President about Israel's legitimacy. Ah, but in Kissingerian realpolitik logic, it "works:" states must talk to each other, but not, apparently, to each others' internal rebel movements. George III, then and now, logic.

As for Secretary Rice's offer to "talk," this is a bit disingenuous, as Rice's offers thus far come with the precondition that Iran give up uranium enrichment. In that sense, sure, there is a problem about the agenda, whether Iran's uranium enrichment is to be part of the talks, or something Iran is being expected to give up, as a precondition.

3. In response to question about what person the US should send to talk to Iran, Kissinger remarkably says it's "generally not a good idea" to start such talks at a high level.

Really? One wonders then just how the Nixon Administration's famous opening to China was achieved? Was that some low level contact that pulled that off? Perhaps Kissinger is merely recognizing that neither Bush nor Rice are the least bit likely to meet with the Iranians this year, and granting them a (transparent) fig leaf.

Speaking of low level, underneath the radar activity, the US representative to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, a Sada Cumber, is being quoted in Iranian sources saying that "the US is prepared to work with Iran..."

4. Other notable HAK quotes: "Regime change cannot be an objective of our foreign policy." -- at least not if we wish to solve regional problems... In contemplating "if" Iran would be willing to address our concerns, Kissinger suggests the US would have an "obligation" to respond.

This hints headlines to come. Never mind Rice's lame claims to the contrary, Kissinger apparently is aware of the various "grand-bargain" offers from Iran.

As for eschewing "regime change," did candidate McCain get the memo?

5. Intriguingly, Kissinger suggests that he has been part of "totally private" talks with unspecified Iranians. He claims that "approaches" have been put before these Iranians "which with a little flexibility on their part" would "surely" lead to negotiations.

I'm not sure what to make of this. Might Kissinger be part of the ongoing discrete "private" efforts with the Iranians? I doubt it, but who knows? One wonders too of a rat in the works here, as once could speculate that such a disclosure, that Kissinger himself is involved in private talks with Iran, might be a sure way to wreck them.

Iran's Parliament Elections & Red Cards

Iran's Parliamentary elections take place today, amid widespread criticisms of the process, especially from within. Iran's vetting Council of Guardians has been especially zealous in blocking thousands of prominent reformists from running for election to Iran's 290 seat Parliament. (Majlis)

Such vetting provoked loud condemnation, with one reformer, Ali Akbar Motashamipur, publicly proclaiming that, "If anyone's qualifications should be rejected, it is the 12 members of the Council of Guardians." He boldly characterized the Council's rejections as "falsifying, fraudulent, slanderous, and seditious" and called on "all the people to resist any government which applies such tactics."

While nearly 900 candidate rejections were eventually reversed, Iranians appear split over whether the elections provide significant choices, whether they constitute a referendum on the policies of President Ahmadinejad, or whether choosing not to vote constitutes a "vote against the system" or a "vote for arrogance." (that is, for American and external intervention)

Here's a useful round-up of diverse western reporting on the elections thus far. I also suggest attention to Scott Peterson's recent reporting. Last week, he touched on the unprecedented battles over who owns the revolution, the role of the military in politics, and the legacy of Ayatollah Khomeini.

Among the sensations afoot, Iran's new Revolutionary Guards commander stirred a hornet's nest when he declared that, "To follow the path of the Islamic revolution, support for the principlists is necessary, inevitable, and a divine duty of all revolutionary groups..."

That "brought stinging rebuke from across the political spectrum, even from fellow hard-liners such as the editor of the hard-line newspaper Kayhan, who called it a "faulty declaration" that is "against the clear guidelines." Hassan Khomeini, the reformist grandson of Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini, proclaimed that, "If a soldier wants to enter into politics, he needs to forget the military and the presence of a gun in politics means the end of all dialogue." (What a concept...)

On Monday, Mehdi Karrubi, the former Majles speaker, invoked a sports analogy (sorry Helena) to lament the prospects for fellow reformists: "we are like a football team; many of our players have been given a red card."

Hard-line outlets fiercely reject such criticisms. On Wednesday, the newspaper Resalat editorialized that many "extremist" reformists "deserved a red card," and, in any case, the refomists should be thankful to the Guardian Council. If they hadn't been disqualified, the lame logic goes, there would have been too many candidates, and the reformists would have negated each other's strength, with up to seven competing for each vacancy.

Resalat conveniently doesn't mention the many obstacles in the way of political party formation in Iran. Nor does it mention that reformists apparently are still blocked from running in over half of the contests. I've seen independent reports, including this one, suggesting reformist candidates are being allowed to compete for only 110 out of 290 seats.

Many Iranians will deem the present Iranian Majlis elections as too crabbed to be even worth getting their "fingers stamped," as Peterson's dispatch today suggests. The Guardian headline today opines, "Iran's reformists" are facing a challenge to fight off irrelevance in an election they cannot win. Yet as the paper's Julian Borger notes, "For all its limitations, political leaders of every hue still believe there is something worth fighting for in the Majlis election."

Perhaps because I subscribe to a more nuanced view of Iran's ever shifting factional struggles, I will be watching for content, even if it appears that the remaining reformist candidates do not fare well. Among the presumed "conservatives," there are widely differing viewpoints and tendencies. For example, it remains quite unclear how many "moderate conservatives" critical of Ahmadinejad remained in the race. Hope may be in the details.

Farzaneh Milani on "Hostage Narratives"

Our University of Virginia friend, Professor Farzeneh Milani, has just published a brilliant review essay in the current issue of Middle East Report, "On Women's Captivity in the Islamic World."

Drawing from her own forthcoming book, long in the works, Milani analyzes how the Muslim woman is commonly reduced in American "non-fiction" bestselling pulp to being a "virtual prisoner.... the victim of an immobilizing faith, locked up inside her mandatory veil—a mobile prison shrunk to the size of her body."

Here's a splendid thematic excerpt:

"The recent spate of memoirs and autobiographies involving Muslim captors and their native or non-Muslim victims, a mutant category I call “hostage narratives,” puts a new and fascinating twist on the familiar theme of women’s captivity in the Islamic world. It is no longer mainly Western men who recount the tales of confinement, but women who recount them firsthand.... It is women’s own longing to escape, their own urgent plea to be liberated. The hostage narrative relies on the authority of personal experience, shares an insider’s perspective and commands more trust and legitimacy. Written in English, addressing Americans directly and concerned with national and international security for good measure, this category of literature fetishizes the veil."

In formulaic works, from Mahmoody’s Not without My Daughter to Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran to Ali's The Caged Virgin, women languish within a gulag, crying out for "liberation" from without. For this review essay, Milani avoids questions about the motives, agendas, or even veracity of the writers or publishers. Instead, Milani wants to know what makes us in the west so readily receptive to such stark presentations.

The analysis is laced with political implications, and Milani locates the genesis of the modern "hostage narratives" to a political event: the US-Iran hostage crisis.

An indelible sense of anguish etched itself into the collective memory of a justifiably outraged nation. “America in Captivity” was the headline that summed up the mood of a country in psychic pain. Like harrowing flashbacks of a trauma, hostage taking became a recurrent theme in books and films and news clips about Iran and, by extension, the Islamic world.

Wittingly or otherwise, American publishers have kept Americans largely hostage to sterile memories, now nearly 3 decades old.

Milani is not entertaining "illusions" and concedes that "repression, autocracy, political and religious purges, censorship, and gender inequity" within Islamic realms are realities that should be, and are, widely studied. Yet as I too have written, Iran in particular is "a land of paradoxes, a society in transition."

"[N]o one can accuse the Islamic Republic of intolerance toward its own contradictions, particularly when it comes to the treatment of women. Indeed, two competing narratives of womanhood exist side by side in Iran today. Iranian women can vote and run for some of the highest offices in the country, but must observe an obligatory dress code. They can drive personal vehicles, even taxis and trucks and fire engines, but cannot ride bicycles. (an irony I explored here at jwn last July - scott) They are seated away from men in the back of buses, but can be squashed in between perfect male strangers in overcrowded jitney taxis. They have entered the world stage as Nobel Peace Laureates, human rights activists, best-selling authors, prize-winning film directors and Oscar nominees, but cannot enter government offices through the same door as men. "

More accurately then, life for Iranian women reflects a "complex mixture of protest and accommodation, of resistance and acquiescence." The Monitor's Scott Peterson recently captured this "ebb and flow" experienced by Iranian women; the problems grab the headlines, the push-back less so.

Milani's review essay deserves close consideration, particularly her plea to fellow Americans to stop "suspending our critical judgment" and to seek out the competing narrative of the undiscovered Muslim woman. In her, Milani suggests we shall find

"a moderating, modernizing force, a seasoned negotiator of confined spaces, a veteran trespasser of boundaries, walls, fences, cages, blind windows, closed doors and iron gates."

Ehud Barak the blocker?

Abu Mazen has been quoted as saying that a "senior figure" in the Israeli cabinet has been blocking the Israel-Hamas peace deal and he is widely thought to have been referring to Defense Minister Ehud Barak. As some possible corroborating evidence for this, note that IOF troops operating undercover killed five militants in an assassination op in the West Bank today. Of the five, four were reported as being Islamic Jihad and one with the (Fateh-linked) Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.

In the west, Ehud Barak is generally widely thought of as a relative "peacenik" among Israeli political leaders. In 1999, when he was head of the Labor Party, he was indeed elected PM on a strongly pro-peace platform. ("I will complete the negotiations with the Palestinians within 6-9 months," etc.) He failed miserably. In fact, he was hustled at the speed of light out of being the IDF's chief of staff into being head of Labor, and never had time to learn anything at all about politics or diplomacy along the way. Hence, the coalition that he headed in Israel fell apart in almost record time, because of his total lack of political skills. The "peace process" fell apart disastrously, too, bringing us n short order Sharon's disastrous September 2000 visit to Al-Aqsa Mosque, the outbreak of the Second Intifada, and Sharon's amazing trioumphant re-entry into national leadership just 17 years after the Kahan Commission had said he should be banned from high office for life.

Along the way, Barak did make what could be described as two "drive-by, quickie" attempts at peacemaking. One with Hafez al-Asad, which failed miserably because of Barak's arrogance and duplicity (and Bill Clinton's complicity with both those aspects of Bark's behavior.) That failure almost certainly helped kill Hafez al-Asad. After that one failed, Barak turned those same attributes in Yasser Arafat's direction, forcing him to the completely ill-prepared Camp David 2 summit from which both Barak and Clinton emerged vociferously and in a quite one-sided way blaming Arafat.

My best friends in the Israeli peace movement heap a lot of blame on Barak for killing the Israeli peace movement at that point. By successfully spreading the (significantly inaccurate) story that he had made Arafat a "generous offer" and that Arafat had turned it down out of hand, Barak spread the idea very broadly in Israel and the US that the Israelis had "no partner for peace" on the Palestinian side.

Israel's Labour Party has always been a flawed vehicle for any hopes of concluding a just and sustainable peace. One problem with the party since its inception has been the extremely incestuous relationship between its leadership and that of the Israeli military. Some of the IDF's retired generals have become voices of good sense regarding the need for peacemaking; but many more of them have not. People like Ephraim Sneh, Binyamin ("Fouad") Ben-Eliezer, and Ehud Barak have taken into the party's upper echelons the mindset of bulldozers and bullies. They are also very much aware of the huge interests many of their friends and former colleagues have in the success of Israel's massive military-industrial complex.

So I'm not totally surprised now if we see Ehud Olmert being more forward-leaning on peace issues than Ehud Barak.

Let's hope Barak gets up to no more mischief and the Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal can still be saved.

Israel-Hamas deal closer; New role for Abu Mazen

Hamas looks as though it is moving ever closer to concluding the ceasefire (Tahdi'a) deal with Israel. (For previous sit reps on this see 1 and 2.) A couple of important markers this morning:

-- Hamas PM Ismail Haniyeh has publicly laid out the terms and extent of the deal his movement seeks. That Reuters reports says this:

"There must be a commitment by Israel to end all acts of aggression against our people, assassinations, killings and raids, and lift the (Gaza) siege and reopen the crossings," Ismail Haniyeh, leader of Hamas's administration in the Gaza Strip, said in a speech. [It was at Gaza's Islamic University, much of which was destroyed by Fateh in fighting last year.]

A ceasefire, he said, should be "reciprocal, comprehensive and simultaneous," apply both to the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and be approved by other Palestinian factions.

-- This same position is also substantially confirmed from Hamas's over-all leadership, the political bureau based in Damascus. The Hamas-linked PIC website also looks as though it is preparing Hamas's Palestinian supporters for the news of the hopefully imminent conclusion of the ceasefire deal, by framing it in the context of a report that Olmert has acknowledged his government's failure to stop the Gaza-originated rocket attacks on southern Israel.

-- Progress is also apparently being made in the effort to achieve an intra-Palestinian reconciliation. Hamas head Khaled Meshaal is supposed to be in Yemen today or tomorrow to help Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh along with that.

Paradoxically, as Israel and Hamas move closer to achieving a (hopefully) workable, Gaza-based ceasefire agreement Fateh boss and PA president Mahmoud Abbas will be taking on a new role: that of the "public face" of intermediation between the two sides. The leaders of both Israel and Hamas both need him to play that role, since neither of those sets of leaders wants to stand up and tell their people openly that they are dealing directly with the other.

Abu Mazen himself probably doesn't relish playing the role of "front man" for either of these two much bigger and more significant parties. But it's not as if he has many other options.

Update, Wed., 11:20 EST:

This new report from Haaretz's Ami Issacharoff neatly illustrates Abu Mazen's emerging role, and the weakness that has pushed him into it. Issacharoff wites:

A deal being formulated between Israel, Egypt and Hamas involves deploying Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' troops at the crossings with the Gaza Strip, Palestinian sources told Haaretz yesterday.

Note there who is doing the negotiating and who would merely get to be "deployed" by those negotiators...

US war in Iraq: the financial cost to Americans

Nobel Economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz and his colleague Linda Bilmes have recently tallied the overall cost to the US economy of George W. Bush's war in Iraq at $3 trillion. I haven't read enough of their study to understand what assumption they are using there for the future length of the war going forward. (Can anybody know that at this point? If John McCain is serious about committing the US to the battlefield there for "100 years", then at what point do the costs of that engagement become simply unquantifiable? Pretty soon into the 100 years, I'd say.)

Next week we will mark the fifth anniversary of this tragic engagement. In those five years Iraq, the country, has been essentially destroyed. Scores of thousands, or perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Iraqis have lost their lives. More than four million of them have been displaced within or outside the country's borders. Compared with the suffering that the war has inflicted on Iraqis, it seems almost trivial to mention the loss it has inflicted on the US citizenry. Nearly 4,000 volunteer service members have been killed, and tens of thousands more left with lasting physical injuries; hundreds of thousands with mental and spiritual injuries. (Remembering that just about all Iraq's 30 million people have been left with mental and spiritual injuries by the war.)

And then, there is also the cost of the financial costs to the US citizenry, which in themselves are by no means trivial.

What was the war alleged to be "about", again? Oh, WMDs, you might remember. SUNY Purchase professor Barbara Hatch Rosenberg has tallied the total budget of the UN's 2002 inspection operation in Iraq (UNMOVIC) at "approximately $80 million, which includes the initial purchase of permanent equipment." The budget of UNMOVIC's predecessor, UNSCOM was "$25-30 million per year." What is more, UNSCOM worked! Its operations and attentiveness did indeed lead to Saddam Hussein ending and destroying all his WMD programs sometime in the mid 1990s.

So imagine if, in 2002, in response to all the-- as it turned out, completely hyped up, cherry-picked, and perhaps downright fabricated-- allegations about Saddam still having WMD programs, the US had allowed the UN simply to continue with the UNMOVIC program, which was much more intrusive yet than the UNSCOM program.

(Which had worked... Did I mention that before?)

It would have cost the international community around $80 million a year.

Instead of which, the US taxpayers, with almost no help from anyone else (and after all, why should they?) are currently paying out on the continuing war in Iraq at a rate that Stiglitz and Bilmes estimate at $12 billion per month. That is, $144 billion per year.

Back in January 2003, when I went with my friends from the Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice to the City Council hearing at which our city became formally designated as a "City for Peace", I spoke to the councillors and explained how-- after my study of Israel's lengthy military invasion and subsequent occupation of Lebanon, I had noted the degree to which maintaining that occupation had become a massive drag on Israel's economy. (I wrote about that, too, in those pre-war months of 2003.) And I told the city councillors that it was evident that:

(1) the US would find it far harder to get out of Iraq than it was to get in, in spite of all the talk about a "cake-walk", etc;

(2) The costs of the maintaining the post-invasion occupation would be huge, and mounting;

(3) Just the logistics costs alone, of sustaining a massive occupation force at such a distance from the US's own borders, would be exponentially higher than the comparable costs had been for Israel, given that Lebanon was right next door; and

(4) All this money would have to come from somewhere; and it would in fact come out of the US's ability to provide decent basic services for its own citizens at home, which meant that it would be communities like Charlottesville that would end up suffering.

Guess what. It has all been happening.

This morning, as I drove from C'ville up to Washington DC I was listening to the hearing the Senate Appropriations Committee held on the costs of the war. Depressing, indeed. But at least we have a democratic majority in the senate which is holding hearings like this. I thought the Committee Chair pro-tem Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) did a great job.

Support democratic principles in Egypt!

Reuters is reporting from Cairo that Egypt's biggest opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood says that only 50 or 60 of the thousands of its members who have tried to register as candidates in the April 8 local elections have been allowed to do so.

Reuters reports this:

Since the middle of February police have detained, usually without charges, more than 300 Brotherhood members who were planning to stand or who were helping with campaigning.

Muslim Brotherhood officials said on Monday that the movement planned to field about 7,000 candidates for the 52,600 seats at stake in the elections on village, town, district and provincial councils across the country.

The Brotherhood seeks an Islamic state through non-violent, democratic means. The government calls it a banned organisation but allows it to operate within limits.

Egypt's President Husni Mubarak receives considerable financial, military, and "security sector" support from the US and from other western democracies. Now is a time for democrats in western and other countries to stand up. Do we support democracy in other countries only when it brings to power people who agree completely with our own views? Or do we support the participation in it of all parties and movements that agree to abide by the rules of the democratic game, first and foremost among them being an agreement to settle differences through nonviolent means?

Regarding the use of violence and violent intimidation sin the prent confrontation between the Mubarak regime and the opposition political forces in Egypt, look at any of the pictures of what is happening at the candidate-registration places and read any of the accounts of what is happening, and you decide: which side is trying to use violence and intimidation?

Western governments should inform Mubarak that the aid they give him is completely conditional on him allowing these long-planned elections to proceed in a free and fair manner. Otherwise, what kind of "democracy" is it that these governments proclaim?

Will this Israel-Hamas de-escalation continue?

Barak Ravid and Amos Harel of Haaretz tell us that PA President Mahmoud Abbas told al-Arabiyya t.v. that

Hamas has asked Israel to refrain from killing its leaders, and the leaders of militant movement Islamic Jihad. Abbas said "I think that Israel has agreed or will soon agree." He added that the details of the agreement will likely emerge in the coming days.

I couldn't find it on Arabiyya's English-language site and didn't have time to look on their Arabic-language site.

All the reporting I'm seeing today (read below) indicates that:

(1) There has been a notable lull in the armed conflict between Israel and Hamas;

(2) The Israel-Hamas negotiations currently being mediated by Egypt, that I wrote about in depth here on Saturday, are now very serious indeed; and the present lull may well be designed-- by the relevant actors on all sides-- to give them the maximum chance to succeed; and

(3) The desire for revenge stirred up in some quarters in Israel by last week's killings in the Mercaz Harav yeshiva may well have been deflected by Olmert away from Gaza and into the announcement of a couple of new settlement-construction projects in the occupied West Bank.

It is worth noting, too, that as Husni Mubarak's regime in Egypt acts in this matter it is acutely aware of the rising pressure it faces from its own, very strongly pro-Hamas citizenry.

AP reports from Jerusalem today that officials there say that PM Olmert,

has instructed the army to scale back airstrikes and raids into the Gaza Strip in response to a recent drop in rocket fire from the territory...

Israeli defense officials and the Hamas rulers of Gaza said there was no formal truce in place. But the officials in Olmert's office said the prime minister had ordered the army to rein in its operations to allow Egypt to proceed in mediation talks.

This is an intriguing follow-up to what I was reporting here on Saturday, namely that the Egypt-mediate Israel-Hamas negotiation seemed to be making serious progress.

Haaretz's Ravid and Harel write this:

Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that Israel would continue to operate against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

"The fighting is ongoing and will continue and will at times increase and decrease," he said.

"There is not at this point any agreement," Barak said. "But if today people go to school in Ashkelon without Grad-type [rockets], or sit in Sderot and Sapir College without Qassams, I wouldn't propose complaining about any quiet day, but at any moment in which we need to act, we will."

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri also said Monday that no comprehensive cease-fire had been reached. Hamas officials said their leaders would, however, continue Egyptian-led efforts to secure a truce.

The government recently ordered the IDF to exercise restraint in operations in the Gaza Strip, pursuant to what a senior government official termed new rules of the game forged in the aftermath of last week's military operation in Gaza.

A separate piece in Haaretz, co-written by Harel and Ami Issacharoff, gives details of the decline in Gaza-sourced rocketings of southern Israel in recent days, though they concluded this didn't seem to have been the result of a specific agreement between Israel and Hamas. They wrote:

At its peak, on February 29, some 50 rockets were fired each day, mostly by Hamas militants. In the middle of last week, the rate dropped to 10-15 rockets per day, fired by more extremist groups - but the Qassams were provided to them mostly by Hamas. Since last Friday, one or two rockets have been fired each day.

As for the Hamas-linked Palestine Information Center, yesterday it reported from Cairo that,

Egyptian diplomatic sources have revealed that a comprehensive plan for calm, ending siege and opening crossings in the Gaza Strip was ready with international approval but still facing difficulties.

The sources ... added that the Americans as well as the Europeans were supportive of the Egyptian efforts.

They explained that the mediation bid targets achieving calm, lifting the siege, solving inter-Palestinian problems and resuming negotiations.
<