Speaking Wednesday morning (September 1) to the staff of the Royal Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in Oslo, Freeman argued that, in their pursuit of a sustainable and final peace settlement, European and Arab states should be prepared to convene their own values-driven peace process outside the currently shackled UN system, if necessary.

At the core of this process should, he said, be an ultimatum that if the two parties can't reach a peace settlement within a year, the world's states would impose one: This would be either a call for recognition of a Palestinian state within all the Palestinian areas that lie beyond Israel's 1967 borders-- or, recognition of Israel's sovereignty over all of Mandate Palestine and a requirement that it grant equal rights to all who are governed by Israel.

On October 1, my company Just World Books will be publishing Freeman's first collection of writings on the Middle East, titled America's Misadventures in the Middle East. The book contains much new material, including a detailed account of how he saw the strategy and diplomacy unfolding during the US-Saudi-led campaign to liberate Kuwait from its Iraqi occupiers back in 1991, when he was the U.S. ambassador in Saudi Arabia. It also contains several chapters that analyze the mis-steps Pres. G.W. Bush made-- both when he ignored the challenge of pushing for a fair and sustainable peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and when he pushed the U.S. into the unjustified invasion and occupation of Iraq.

In his speech in Oslo, Freeman notes that many previous rounds of the US-led "peace process" between Israelis and Palestinians have proved to be only,

diplomatic distractions [that] have served to obscure Israeli actions and evasions that were more often prejudicial to peace than helpful in achieving it. Behind all the blather, the rumble of bulldozers has never stopped... When the curtain goes up on the diplomatic show in Washington tomorrow, will the players put on a different skit? There are many reasons to doubt that they will.

One is that the Obama administration has engaged the same aging impresarios who staged all the previously failed “peace processes” to produce and direct this one with no agreed script.

In his address in Oslo Freeman called forthrightly for Hamas's inclusion in some manner in the peace diplomacy, describing it (correctly) as "the party that won the democratically expressed mandate of the Palestinian people to represent them," and noting that "there can be no peace without its buy-in."

He concluded by asking Norway and its fellow Europeans to do four things to maximize the chances that this latest peace "process" might become an actual peace:

1. Get behind the Arab peace initiative...

2. Help create a Palestinian partner for peace. "Saudi Arabia has several times sought to create a Palestinian peace partner for Israel by bringing Fatah, Hamas, and other factions together. On each occasion, Israel, with U.S. support, has acted to preclude this. Active organization of non-American Western support for diplomacy aimed at restoring a unity government to the Palestinian Authority could make a big difference."

3. Reaffirm and reinforce international law. "If ethnic cleansing, settlement activity, and the like are not just 'unhelpful' but illegal, the international community should find a way to say so, even if the UN Security Council cannot. Otherwise, the most valuable legacy of Atlantic civilization – its vision of the rule of law – will be lost. When one side to a dispute is routinely exempted from principles, all exempt themselves, and the law of the jungle prevails. The international community needs collectively to affirm that Israel, both as occupier and as regional military hegemon, is legally accountable internationally for its actions. If the UN General Assembly cannot 'unite for peace' to do what an incapacitated Security Council cannot, member states should not shrink from working in conference outside the UN framework."

4. Set a deadline linked to an ultimatum. "Accept that the United States will frustrate any attempt by the UN Security Council to address the continuing impasse between Israel and the Palestinians. Organize a global conference outside the UN system to coordinate a decision to inform the parties to the dispute that if they cannot reach agreement in a year, one of two solutions will be imposed. Schedule a follow-up conference for a year later. The second conference would consider whether to recommend universal recognition of a Palestinian state in the area beyond Israel’s 1967 borders or recognition of Israel’s achievement of de jure as well as de facto sovereignty throughout Palestine (requiring Israel to grant all governed by it citizenship and equal rights at pain of international sanctions, boycott, and disinvestment). Either formula would force the parties to make a serious effort to strike a deal or to face the consequences of their recalcitrance. Either formula could be implemented directly by the states members of the international community."

Watch this space for news on that! Meantime, you can follow Just World Books's news on Twitter, here.

We here in the United States have many skeletons in the closet of our country's history. One of the most tragic is the conflict and bloodshed that continue in Iraq, seven-and-a-half years after Pres. Bush's completely unjustified decision to invade and occupy the country.

Back in 2002 and early 2003, I was one of only a small number of commentators in the U.S. media who argued strongly that Bush should not launch the invasion towards which he was so clearly heading, and that the casus belli he was preparing, based on Saddam Hussein's alleged possession of WMDs had no foundation anywhere near strong enough to justify the terrible privations that any war would bring.

Today, those privations still continue. Today in Baghdad, 46 were killed in a series of coordinated car-bomb attacks, bringing to over 97,000 the number of Iraqi civilians who have confirmedly been killed in the political inferno the country has become since March 2003.

The U.S., which has been the occupying power under international law and in fact the strongest military/security presence in the country since March 2003, has to bear over-all responsibility for those deaths.

The invasion and occupation were, I repeat, unjustified. They were also acts of choice by Pres. Bush, the result of a decision he took under strong pressure from several parties including, notably, the strongly pro-Israeli networks that were dug well into the U.S. Congress and the Defense Department at that time.

Now, those same networks are still influential in the U.S. Congress, where their shrill calls for further escalation and the possible launching of a military action (= war) against Iran still receive a ready hearing from many Members.

Fortunately, they are not as influential in the Robert Gates Pentagon as they were in the Donald Rumsfeld Pentagon. So we still have some hope we may avert an outright military attack against Iran.

But the situation in Iraq certainly still deserves our strong concern.

Regular readers of Reidar Visser's great blog Iraq and Gulf Analysis have been following there the notable failure of the leaders of Iraq's electoral lists to put together a coalition that can do anything to govern the country. That, though it is now nearly six months since they were elected. Hidden near the bottom of this (PDF) excellent little security round-up for Iraq, prepared by the NGO Coordination Committee for Iraq (NCCI) is a footnote stating that "many Iraqi politicians have left the country for the time being. Many politicians plan to return once a new government is in place and their security can be guaranteed."

(Right now, Reidar is near completion on pulling together a book for Just World Books, based on his blog posts from the past five years. It should be available for sale in mid-November.)

Next Tuesday, Pres. Obama is going to make what is being previewed as a "big" speech about Iraq, timed to coordinate with the current (still very partial) drawdown of U.S. forces from the country.

The way VP Biden and others have been talking recently, they've been describing the drawdown as Obama "delivering" on a promise he made to the American people about undertaking this drawdown by the end of this month.

In fact, the drawdown is an even more incomplete delivery on the promise the U.S. government under Pres. Bush made, back in late November 2008, to "hand over sovereignty to the Iraqis", to end U.S. engagement in combat operations, and to pull U.S. forces out of all Iraqi cities by the end of June 2009-- preparatory to a complete pullout of all U.S. forces from the country by the end of 2011.

But Obama's whole policy in Iraq-- like his policy in Afghanistan-- has shown zero signs of any serious strategic thinking, or the kinds of strategically informed actions that are so desperately needed to stanch the bloodshed and give the country's 30 million people some hope of rebuilding their society.

The only sign of any serious strategic engagement in bringing together the heads of Iraq's electoral lists and-- as is also necessary-- the representatives of the country's large and in some cases very nervous neighbors is one reportedly being undertaken by Syria.

Sami Moubayed of The Forward (Damascus), wrote today that there is much talk of Syria launching a "Taif-like" initiative to try to find common ground between the relevat internal and external actors in Iraq.

He adds:

Reportedly, the "Syrian Taif" is backed by strong players in the neighborhood, like Saudi Arabia and Turkey, and stands unopposed by the Barack Obama administration, which is very worried over the political vacuum in Baghdad.

To date, nothing official has been released regarding a Syrian Taif, but such a conference seems all the more logical as scores of Iraqi politicians, from every end of the political spectrum, have been visiting Damascus in recent months for talks with top Syrian officials.

To date, ex-prime minister Iyad Allawi, who controls 91 seats in the newly elected parliament, has paid two visits to Damascus, and so has Ammar Hakim of the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council (SIIC), whose bloc has a total of 70 seats, and Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who commands 40 of the 70 seats held by the National Iraqi Alliance (NIA)...

The only Iraqi heavyweight still expected to make the Damascus visit is incumbent Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who controls 89 seats in parliament, and whose relations with Syria were strained in the summer of 2009.

I wish the best for the Syrian government or any other party that can help to bring the terrible bloodshed within Iraq to an end, and to help Iraq's leaders form the stable government that their people so desperately need.

But that still does not wash away the shame and intense grief I feel regarding the very destructive policies my own government has pursued against the Iraqi people for the past 19 years. There is no way any American could describe what our country has done there as any kind of "victory".

But... my big news this summer has been that the project that I announced here last April, to found a completely new book-publishing house from scratch and have it release its first titles this autumn is now well on its way to achieving that goal...

Just World Books is getting born!

Today I sent off to the typesetter the whole interior of Chas Freeman's beautifully argued book America's Misadventures in the Middle East: It will be published in late September. (The delay is because we have some fabulous people reading it with a view to providing blurbs/endorsements.... and hey, it's summer.)

Next up, after Chas's book, will be Laila El-Haddad's amazing chronicle of the last four-and-a-half years, Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything In Between:
This one will be out October 14, God willing. Laila is in Gaza with her kids right now, s batch-editing the four Parts of her book-- which will have lots of her great photos in it, as well, is a big challenge. But I have what feels like a great team of editors, graphics and layout director, strategic advisers, etc. So I have great confidence we'll make that deadline.

By the way, a main reason I need to blog this, is that I'm about to start opening the auction for the non-English rights to these works.

If any of you has friends in non-English-language publishing houses who ought to know about these books and JWB's other titles-- write me, and give me their contact details!

... We are, I recognize a little behind in launching the long-promised Just World Books website. But the design firm, Siteshine, has been doing a great job. One delay has been because we're trying to incorporate as many social-media options into there as possible. Anyway, it looks beautiful; it's gaining more functionality every day; and y'all will be the first to know when we finally do launch it!

So we're already making some good plans to launch these first two books. In addition, last night, I got the bulk of the manuscript for Joshua Foust's book about U.S. policy in Afghanistan, which looks like a really important contribution... Then Reidar Visser's book about Nuri al-Maliki's government in Iraq, 2006-2010 should be coming in, in manuscript form, at the end of the month. So the fall publishing schedule will have four really big titles on it. (And yes, your friends in non-English publishing houses can start bidding on those two, too.)

I might also be publishing a little compilation of my own, that would bring a 25th-anniversary reprint of my 1985 book on Lebanon and my 2005 and 2006 articles on Hizbullah, together in one volume. But I'm a little behind on that project.) It might not come out till Spring 2011.

... Being a publisher, it turns out, is a lot like being a mom: A long pregnancy, an even longer period of labor, and finally-- one hopes-- a successful delivery. It's also like being a mom because I'm supporting and promoting the work of others, much more than my own; and that feels great.

Actually, I made that point about publishing being a lot like being mom on the new Just World Books Twitter feed. Hey, any of you who are on Twitter, follow Just World Books over there!

David's money quote from Obama:

"It is very important to put before the Iranians a clear set of steps that we would consider sufficient to show that they are not pursuing nuclear weapons," Obama said, adding: "They should know what they can say 'yes' to." As in the past, he left open the possibility that the United States would accept a deal that allows Iran to maintain its civilian nuclear program, so long as Iran provides "confidence-building measures" to verify that it is not building a bomb.

Obama also gave Ignatius and his colleagues the message that the administration is eager to talk to Tehran about Afghanistan-- though David gave no record that he said anything similar about coordination over Iraq. That, even though the politics/diplomacy of the the U.S. military effecting its now firmly promised cessation of combat operations in Iraq remain extremely unclear, complex, and potentially hazardous.

Ignatius wrote that after Obama left the room two un-named "senior officials" (one of whom was almost certainly Jones-- the other, who knows? Dennis Ross???) in effect spun, or perhaps more politely "contextualized", what the journos had just heard from the commander-in-chief by saying that the timing is now good to "test" Tehran through a diplomatic overture because Tehran has now started hurting from the new sanctions imposed by the U.N. in May/June.

Right now, the President needs all the support he can get for a policy of real and sincere diplomatic engagement with Iran. (As opposed to the kind of faux 'engagement' that is designed to fail, and whose sole intention is to prepare the way for a new war.)

Over at Time mag, Joe Klein has a thoughtful essay summing up the woeful series of developments that was set in train the last time pro-Likud extremists managed to jerk our nation into a quite unnecessary and unjustified war of aggression in the Middle East. (Iraq, 2003.)

It must not happen again.

As Max writes:

It is not hard to imagine what lessons the high school students who participated in the leveling of al-Arakib took from their experience, nor is it especially difficult to predict what sort of citizens they will become once they reach adulthood. Not only are they being indoctrinated to swear blind allegiance to the military, they are learning to treat the Arab outclass as less than human...

[T]he scenes from al-Arakib, from the demolished homes to the uprooted gardens to the grinning teens who joined the mayhem, can be viewed as much more than the destruction of a village. They are snapshots of the phenomenon that is laying Israeli society as a whole to waste.

Yesterday, Haaretz had this report about the arrest of Mona Sha'ar, a resident of the Golan town of Majdal Shams.

Haaretz's Jack Khoury writes that Sha'ar was arrested

for allegedly committing crimes against the security of Israel.

Her son, Fada Sha'ar, was the first in this case to be arrested several weeks prior for alleged espionage and committing crimes against Israeli security. Her husband was also been arrested in connection to the case.

Foreign direct investment in Israel fell by 64% in 2009 to only $3.9 billion, down from $10.9 billion in 2008. Israel fell from 54th place in 2008 to 80th in 2009 in terms of FDI.

Of course, since Israel plummeted from 54th place globally in '08 to 80th in '09, 26 other countries did relatively better than it did last year. One was China, which I put onto the Google chart there.

Equally obviously, it was not only the global economic turndown that brought down Israel's total FDI. If it had been that, all other countries would have been roughly equally affected, and Israel might have retained its ranking. There must have been some other factor.

I'm pretty certain that worldwide horror over the Israeli assault on Gaza must have played a role-- buttressed by the emergence of the worldwide BDS movement. Obviously, we should all keep the pressure up until Israelis are prepared to sign onto a fair, compassionate, and sustainable peace with its Palestinian neighbors and indeed, all ts neighbors.

Patrick Cockburn had a lot more details about the study underlying the BBC report, in Saturday's Independent, here.

He writes,

Iraqi doctors in Fallujah have complained since 2005 of being overwhelmed by the number of babies with serious birth defects, ranging from a girl born with two heads to paralysis of the lower limbs. They said they were also seeing far more cancers than they did before the battle for Fallujah between US troops and insurgents.

Their claims have been supported by a survey showing a four-fold increase in all cancers and a 12-fold increase in childhood cancer in under-14s. Infant mortality in the city is more than four times higher than in neighbouring Jordan and eight times higher than in Kuwait.

... The study, entitled "Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005-2009", is by Dr Busby, Malak Hamdan and Entesar Ariabi, and concludes that anecdotal evidence of a sharp rise in cancer and congenital birth defects is correct. Infant mortality was found to be 80 per 1,000 births compared to 19 in Egypt, 17 in Jordan and 9.7 in Kuwait. The report says that the types of cancer are "similar to that in the Hiroshima survivors who were exposed to ionising radiation from the bomb and uranium in the fallout".

Researchers found a 38-fold increase in leukaemia, a ten-fold increase in female breast cancer and significant increases in lymphoma and brain tumours in adults. At Hiroshima survivors showed a 17-fold increase in leukaemia, but in Fallujah Dr Busby says what is striking is not only the greater prevalence of cancer but the speed with which it was affecting people...

The revelations that have interested me most have been those about the extra-judicial killings (assassinations) that have been carried out by the U.S. military against suspected (or merely accused) Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Conducting extra-judicial killings is, of course, a tactic the US military has picked up from Israel, which has used them for many years now.

An "extra-judicial" killing is, of course, just that. It is a killing in which any "evidence" there is against the target is compiled and judged only in secret, by secret accusers.

In the U.S. military, the tendency is to say that the orders that result from this process are to "capture or kill" those designated as targets. But as this Guardian review of the AWL material reveals,

In many cases, the unit has set out to seize a target for internment, but in others it has simply killed them without attempting to capture. The logs reveal that TF 373 has also killed civilian men, women and children and even Afghan police officers who have strayed into its path.

The Nato coalition in Afghanistan has been using an undisclosed "black" unit of special forces, Task Force 373, to hunt down targets for death or detention without trial. Details of more than 2,000 senior figures from the Taliban and al-Qaida are held on a "kill or capture" list, known as Jpel, the joint prioritised effects list.

The unit of elite soldiers, which includes members of the Navy Seals and the Delta Force, get their orders directly from the Pentagon in Washington and operate outside of the chain of command of NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

What on earth were two U.S. "sailors" doing in seriously landlocked Afghanistan, I wondered?

The Spiegel story notes that,

[T]he new information about the secret commando missions could... prove embarrassing for the German government. Roughly 300 men with TF 373 have been stationed on the grounds of Camp Marmal, the German field base in Mazar-e-Sharif, since the summer of 2009. The special unit has chosen a strategically advantageous and shielded location at the airfield, where it operates from the Regional Command North, which is under the command of Germany's armed forces, the Bundeswehr.

The stationing of the unit was a sensitive issue from the very beginning, and officials in Berlin persistently sought to prevent much discussion of the issue.

So much for Pres. Obama having brought a new respect for the rule of law into the conduct of U.S. government activities overseas.

The Guardian account gives many details of instances in which there have been significant killings of bystanders in conjunction with the activities of TF 373. The killing of bystanders (a.k.a. "collateral damage") is indeed horrendous, and tragic. But even if no bystanders were killed at all, the idea of designating individuals for execution based on secret accusations against them is itself inherently anti-democratic and repellent.

I really don't see why Pres. Obama and his advisers don't understand this.

(Perhaps he listens too much to the advice he gets from his many Israeli friends? Of course, Israel's longstanding and persistent use of this grisly tactic hasn't "solved" its many remaining problems with its neighbors, has it? Indeed, by most accounts, it has merely exacerbated those problems. Obama might usefully ponder on that... )

Hat-tip, Phil Weiss.

Henochowicz is the young Jewish-American artist who lost an eye to an IDF tear-gas canister while protesting the continued building of the Apartheid Wall.

She is amazing. Especially when she sings that people need "open their eyes." And then she turns and looks at the camera with one of the lenses in her glasses deliberately clouded over so we don't see her own tragically emptied eye-socket. Actually, with or without those socket-obscuring glasses, Emily Henochowicz both looks and acts like one of the most beautiful young women in the world.

(HT: Dominic.)

Sparks starts by noting that three of the major IDF war crimes reported by the Goldstone commission in Gaza were in fact recently confirmed to have been such by a military investigation undertaken by the IDF high command itself.

He comments, "the real importance of this military investigation is that it vindicates the Goldstone commission," adding:

For Judge Richard Goldstone, particularly, this is a personal vindication, for he was excoriated by leading members of the local Jewish community for chairing the commission. He was told his commission’s findings were lies; that he was naive and gullible for accepting the version of events given by terrorists; and that, since he is a Jew, he was a traitor to his people.

His critics were given support by Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein, who chastised Goldstone for “doing great damage to the state of Israel”. He should have recused himself instead, Goldstein said, and taken no part in the investigating mission.

We secularists need to know what a religious leader in our community means when he seeks to impose such an ethical dictum on a prominent member of his faith — someone who was a founding father of our Constitutional Court and an interpreter of our infinitely important national constitution in this new democracy.

I am reminded here of the conflict between the Dutch Reformed Church and Beyers Naude over the issue of apartheid.

I attended the Dutch Reformed Church service in Linden, Johannesburg, at which Naude had to respond to the church leaders’ demand that he choose between the church’s doctrine of support for apartheid and his commitment to the nonracial Christian Institute he had founded.

In other words, Naude was forced to choose between his moral principles and his loyalty to his own people and their church.

I heard Naude announce his decision that memorable day before the glitterati of Afrikaner nationalism in the packed pews before him. Smilingly, boldly, he told them simply: “I choose God before man.”

In other words, principles, truth and justice before ethnic or group loyalty. It was the defining moment of that great man’s life.

So I ask the chief rabbi that same question today: what is your choice? Then, at the level of plain human decency, don’t you think, Chief Rabbi Goldstein and those members of the Orthodox Jewish community and the South African Zionist Federation whom you lead, that you owe Judge Goldstone an apology? A public, abject apology.

Leaders of the federation went to the extremes of cruelty when they took their religious war against Judge Goldstone (dare I call it a fatwa?) into the heart of his family by trying to ban him from his grandson’s bar mitzvah. Eventually, but it seemed to me somewhat reluctantly, negotiations enabled the family to celebrate this important event together.

But I’m sorry, that wasn’t enough. In this land of ubuntu, this land of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, you must stand up, Chief Rabbi Goldstein, and on behalf of the co-religionists you supported in this calumny, bow your head, apologise and, like the man of God I’m sure you are, beg forgiveness of Judge Richard Goldstone.

More than 550 officers and men of IDF who participated in the “Cast Lead” operation have been interrogated by the investigative military police of the IDF in the last 18 months.

So far the interrogations gave rise to a considerable number of disciplinary – and legal – steps. The most serious one was taken last week when the Chief Military Prosecutor, Aloof Avihai Mandelblit, decided to charge a Giv’ati soldier for committing murder. On another occasion he decided to court-martial a Golani battalion commander for ignoring IDF instructions forbidding “use of neighbor” tactics.

His laconic comment is, "Maybe Judge Goldstone wasn’t so crazy after all." Indeed he wasn't.

I guess my additional comment is that there does seem to be something of a battle going on for the "soul" of the IDF. An army that commits war crimes is not, in most circumstances, a disciplined fighting force. But today's IDF has increasing numbers of military religio-nationalists rising up in its officer ranks (and in the IDF rabbinate), and many of those emerging leaders have racist, brutal views of any non-Jews. Thus we saw those outrageous hate-tracts that were distributed by some portions of the IDF rabbinate among soldiers during the assault of 2008-09... The military police (and thus, presumably, some portions of the general staff who support them) seem to have been rattled enough by the emergence of this openly racist religio-nationalism that they are trying to fight back and curb it? Maybe. Anyway, worth watching what's going on there.

I've signed three new contracts in the past couple of weeks. Two are with Manan Ahmed, who's the principal blogger (Sepoy) at Chapati Mystery and also blogs at Informed Comment: Global Affairs. He'll be publishing one book with JWB on the impact of the ‘Global war on Terror’ on society, culture, and politics, in Pakistan, and on relations between the majority-Muslim world and westerners. The other will be on the impact of the internet and other social and technological innovations on society and culture in Pakistan, and on the “desi” community worldwide.

Those books will both be author-curated compilations of Ahmed's blog posts and other writings.

The third contract I signed is with Ron Mock, who's a professor of political science and peace studies at George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon. His book will be an exploration of the challenges Christian pacifism has faced over the centuries, and continues to face today. It will be coming out next year.

In 2004 Ron (who's an old friend, and an excellent writer and thinker) published a very thoughtful and timely book called Loving Without Giving In: Christian Responses to Terrorism and Tyranny. This one develops and deepens some of the arguments he was making there.

When I was talking with Ron about publishing this new book, I thought it would be nice to make this into the "flagship" book-- or whatever the nonviolent equivalent of that would be-- of a new series of books that JWB might publish on issues in nonviolence. If any JWN readers know people who are doing interesting writing in this field and might want to be included in this series, please let them know about this opportunity and have them contact me!

Finally, since I'm sure people are all excited about Laila El-Haddad's book(s), I should tell you that after further consideration and discussion I have decided her manuscript will be published as one book, after all. It will be a big one-- maybe 350 pages. But it's going to be great. The title we've chosen is Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything In Between. Expected Publication date: October or November 2010.

Amb. Chas Freeman's first book with us is now in editing. Its title is America's Misadventures in the Middle East. Publication date October 2010.

Abdu quotes the stirring (but possibly empty?) words that Secretary Clinton uttered recently at the 10th anniversary meeting of the Community of Democracies in Krakow, Poland:

"Democracies don't fear their own people... They recognize that citizens must be free to come together to advocate and agitate."

Anyway, go read the whole of Abdu's stirring article there.