Yes, I was right on Syria. (And what now?)
I realize it is unseemly, in the world of international-affairs analysis, for someone to say quite bluntly "I told you so". I realize, far more importantly, that the situation in which Syria's 25 million (or so) people find themselves is one of deep and very hard-to-escape crisis-- one that, whether Pres. Asad stays or goes, will (as I noted here in early August of this year) continue to plague them for many, many years to come... and any contention among non-Syrian analysts as to who was "right" and who was "wrong" pales in importance to that deeply tragic fact.
But still, looking back, I think I have been fundamentally correct in my evaluations of the situation in Syria-- from March 2011 until today. And that, at a time when a large majority of people in the U.S. (and 'western') political class had a very different analytical bottom line than my own. Their bottom line was, basically, that the Asad regime was weak, hollow, deeply unpopular, and would crumble "any day now." And since people holding to this belief-- which was nearly always, much more of a belief than an analysis-- have been extremely strong inside the Obama administration as well as in the western chattering classes (including among many self-professed "progressives" or liberals), their belief in the imminent collapse of the Asad regime has driven Washington's policy all along.
Of greatest concern to me has been those people's rigid adherence to the policy of not negotiating or supporting the idea of anyone else negotiating with the Asad regime. Instead of any idea of negotiations, the overthrow of the regime was their overwhelming and primary goal. Negotiations about the future of Syria could, they said, be held only after the President's removal.
Continue reading "Yes, I was right on Syria. (And what now?)"News from the negotiated transition in Burma/Myanmar
I've recently been devouring Evan Osnos's brilliant piece of reporting in The New Yorker, on the exciting, now-underway, negotiated transition to much greater democracy in Myanmar/Burma.
Huge kudos to Osnos for doing this great research and reporting, and to The New Yorker for, presumably, funding his lengthy reporting trip to the country, and then publishing the lengthy article. (Sadly, only an abstract is available free at the link above. I hope you can find the whole, long paper version in your local library.)
Osnos's report is full of fascinating details-- about the calculations that Aung San Suu Kyi and her allies in the NLD were making as they decided to give the democratic opening process a chance; and about the deliberations and discussions that occurred deep inside the ruling junta that led to its participation. U.S. diplomacy, in the person of Secretary Clinton and some of her key aides, also played a role.
This is a major story of our time! It affects the future of all of the country's 60 million people-- and, of course, their neighbors. So why do the U.S. and 'western' media in general give it so little play and so little prominence, compared with the story of the tragic and violent continuing events in (much smaller) Syria?
It is, sadly, the violent aspects of the events in Syria that have been garnering by far the most attention in the western MSM over recent months. That is, both the violence of the regime, and its tragic effects-- which are often waved in front of the western public like a bloody shirt, with the intention being to whip up western opinion against the regime-- and the violence of the opposition, which is far too often romanticized and condoned, with the inevitable effects of opposition violence almost never being shown.
I believe there are two factors which explain the difference between the coverage of Syria and the coverage (or lack thereof) of Burma. Firstly, the sometimes almost pornographic fascination with violence and its representations in the western media, in general-- as opposed to the much more visually 'boring' events that make up the day-to-day grind of diplomacy in a place like Burma/Myanmar; and secondly, the fact that there is huge buy-in from the vast majority of corporate owners and journos in the western MSM to the goal of violent regime change in Syria-- but almost complete indifference to the fate of the 60 million people in Burma.
Not all is roses and honey in Burma yet, I know. But I find the story of the democratic opening there really engaging. I wrote a whole chapter about Aung San Suu Kyi in my 2000 book 'The Moral Architecture of World Peace'. She is an amazing woman, and by all accounts the NLD, that she heads, is a sturdy, resilient, and visionary organization.
In addition, the careful, nonviolent, and negotiated way the transition there is being pursued by the local participants, and supported by external actors, like the United States, is an exemplary way for transitions from authoritarian and/or minority rule to democracy to be undertaken. As in South Africa, 1990-1994. This is exactly what we should be advocating for regarding Syria! If Sec. Clinton can be pursuing these policies of careful diplomacy with respect to the junta in Myanmar that has committed atrocities on a truly massive scale-- some of which, truth be told, continue to this day-- then why on earth has the Obama administration and so much of the rest of the U.S. political elite adopted such a belligerent and escalatory policy toward the regime in Damascus?
By far the best explanation for this contrast is, I think, the role played by the unremitting campaign of anti-Damascus agitation undertaken by pro-Israeli forces in American and other western societies for several decades now. There has been nothing like that agitation maintained against the junta in Burma. And this year is, remember, an election year in America...
It is not too late for the Obama administration to turn away from the path of escalation regarding Syria. Up until now-- and especially with Sec. Clinton's most recent visit to Turkey-- there is no sign that they are doing so. But if they continue along this path, the fallout from any large-scale explosion of hostilities in Syria could well be massive.
Lessons from South Africa and Burma, please!
Two observations on the tragedy in Syria
1. War always inflicts grave rights abuses on residents of the war zone. Additionally, its fog allows-- and its passions encourage-- the commission of a large variety of atrocities such as are very rarely committed in times of peace. Hence, actions tending toward the exacerbation of tensions can never be said to "help" the rights and wellbeing of the numerous human persons who lives in-- or or displaced from-- the zone of contention... And all efforts undertaken to preserve and protect "human rights" should aim first and foremost at the de-escalation of tensions and a relentless search for negotiated rather than fought-for or imposed means of resolution.
2. In Syria, the situation of the country's 22 million residents has already been grievously damaged by the past 15 months of tensions that have escalated to the point of an extremely damaging civil war. The social fabric of the country has been very badly eroded-- a form of destruction that is even more damaging than the concomitant destruction of physical infrastructure. Whether President Asad goes or stays, it will take Syria many years (and leadership qualities very much stronger than anything we have seen to date from either the government or the extremely fissiparous opposition), in order to recover and heal.
Thus, the key issue now is not, as so many westerners still frame it, "whether Asad goes or stays." The issue is how Syria's people can best be helped to pull out of the vortex of sectarian violence into which they are now very rapidly being sucked. Based on all my research and experiences relating to societies mired in, or managing to escape from grievous inter-group violence, it is clear to me that only a pan-Syrian negotiation over forms of government, accountability, and intergroup relations going forward can achieve that.
And to succeed, this negotiation must include, not exclude, the current regime. It was a negotiation of this type that succeeded in South Africa in bringing about a relatively peaceful transition from vicious minority rule to full democracy. In Burma/Myanmar, Sec. Clinton is fully engaged in helping to broker just such a negotiation. The actions of the apartheid government in South Africa and the junta in Burma, were no less brutal than those of the Asad regime in Syria.
In addition, in Syria, it is clear that the opposition is far less committed than, say, Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy in Burma to the pursuit of a nonviolent path. In South Africa, the ANC did have a military wing. But its acts of violence were few and far between, and inside South Africa they were generally conducted along lines that respected the requirement to attack only military targets. In Syria, by contrast, far too much of the armed opposition has been involved in acts of sectarian violence or other kinds of inhumane violence. There is thus very little "moral" case to be made as between the acts of those men of anti-regime violence, many of them salafis or jihadis, and the acts of the regime-- though the regime does command firepower far greater than that available to the oppositionists.
'New' Egypt and the Camp David accords
Despite many setbacks and roadblocks along the way in Egypt, the political situation there is still one of the most hopeful-- and certainly, the most momentous-- phenomena in the region. Egypt, remember, really does carry the strategic ballast of the whole Arab world. How things turn out there is central to the politics of the whole Middle East.
The formation of the new government in Cairo still awaits, apparently, the conclusion of the current intense round of negotiations between the Freedom and Justice Party (with its strong current basis of electoral legitimacy, as well as its strong nationwide grassroots organizing capacity) and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (with its weapons, its backing from Washington, and its strong nationwide military/security organizing capacity.)
Meantime, there has been some speculation about whether the new government will respect the 1978 Camp David Accords and the Egypt-Israel peace treaty that flowed from them in 1979. Most of the rationally based evaluations (e.g. here) of the FJP's behavior conclude that an FJP-led government will not seek to exit the peace treaty (or at least, not any time soon.) However, I think much of this analysis does not go far enough in exploring two other aspects of the subject:
- 1. Even though an FJP-led government may continue to abide strictly by the terms of the treaty and the accords, are there some other kinds of pro-Israeli activity that the previous Egyptian government engaged in that an FJP-led government would not, thereby constraining the freedom of action that Israel has felt that it enjoyed for most of the past 34 years?
2. Are there steps that an FJP-led government might take, fully within the existing context of the Camp David Accords and based on them, that could actually improve the position of Egypt and other parties vis-a-vis Israel?
Regarding #1 above, let us consider first the whole complex of active connivance with Israel and the United States that the Mubarak government engaged in, with regard to the Palestinians. The list of activities is far too long to present fully. But just in recent years we have seen active Egyptian connivance with the plot to overthrow the PA 'government' that was duly elected in 2006; active Egyptian connivance in the campaign to maintain an illegal blockade on Gaza and starve the 1.6 million Palestinians of Gaza into submission; active Egyptian connivance in the internationally waged campaign to allow Israel "all the time it needed" to physically batter and kill the Palestinians of Gaza into submission in 2008-2009; active connivance in all the campaigns to protect Israel from being held to account for its actions against the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), Gaza, Lebanon, or Golan... etc, etc.
None of those actions were "required" under the terms of either the Camp David Accords or the peace treaty. They were actions that Mubarak and his henchman Omar Sulaiman took of their own volition, solely at the behest of the Israelis and Americans, and that the SCAF has kind of kept in place through inertia... The new government of Egypt is very likely to reconsider some of these policies.
Plus, if there were to be another sizeable Israeli assault against Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank, would the government of the new Egypt collude with that plan in the way Mubarak/Sulaiman did in 2008? No. The freedom of action that the Israeli militarists enjoyed under Mubarak/Sulaiman has already been considerably reduced. Appropriate, in a way, to note that Sulaiman died recently: that marked the end of an era for him and for all his long-time friends.
It is when we get on to question #2 above, though, that things become even more interesting. For example, did you know that in one of the documents concluded at Camp David in 1978, Israel and Egypt agreed on:
- the construction of a highway between the Sinai and Jordan near Eilat with guaranteed free and peaceful passage by Egypt and Jordan...
Interesting! Such a highway should be even more feasible today, now that Israel has a peace treaty with Jordan, which it did not have in 1978. This highway would allow for a stream of commercial and other non-military ground traffic ("guaranteed free and peaceful passage") to pass between Egypt and Jordan; and therefore, potentially between North Africa and the whole of the Arab East-- without Israel being to impede it or to charge duties or taxes!
Palestinians could use this highway to transit freely between Gaza and the West Bank... Oh yes, you might say, but the Palestinians were supposed to gain a large degree of freedom of movement between Gaza and the West Bank in the Agreement on Movement and Access, that was agreed among Israel, PA President Abbas, and Egypt back in 2005; and that never happened either...
Well, with a new government in Egypt, Cairo could now actively pursue both these important movement/access agreements...
There are several provisions of the main Camp David accord that also bound the government of Israel to take positive actions towards a "just, comprehensive, and durable, comprehensive, and durable settlement of the Middle East conflict through the conclusion of peace treaties based on Security Council resolutions 242 and 338 in all their parts..."
On the Palestinian front, the government of Israel and the other parties at Camp David agreed that a "self-governing authority" would be constituted in the West Bank and Gaza, and that,
- 3. When the self-governing authority (administrative council) in the West Bank and Gaza is established and inaugurated, the transitional period of five years will begin. As soon as possible, but not later than the third year after the beginning of the transitional period, negotiations will take place to determine the final status of the West Bank and Gaza and its relationship with its neighbors and to conclude a peace treaty between Israel and Jordan by the end of the transitional period. These negotiations will be conducted among Egypt, Israel, Jordan and the elected representatives of the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza... The negotiations shall be based on all the provisions and principles of UN Security Council Resolution 242. The negotiations will resolve, among other matters, the location of the boundaries and the nature of the security arrangements. The solution from the negotiations must also recognize the legitimate right of the Palestinian peoples and their just requirements.
- 1. Egypt actually talking to both the Palestinian leadership and the government of Jordan, which it wasn't in 1978;
2. Jordan in a peace agreement with Israel already; and
3. An "interim" self-governing authority, like the one envisaged at Camp David, already in place in the West Bank and Gaza and with a track record of 18 years behind it. (Some interim, huh?)
Basing its actions on international law and existing international agreements could be a formula that would be both internally and globally very astute for the new Egypt... And a game-changer for that whole "peace process" that became ossified, dysfunctional, and deeply harmful to human rights and international law sometime shortly after the Madrid peace conference of 1991, if not before.
July 2006, lest we forget
In these days six years ago, Israeli PM Ehud Olmert and his team were battering much of Lebanon to smithereens in the "Dahiyeh War"-- designed, as we remember, to break Hizbullah once and for all, primarily by battering Lebanese civilians and their infrastructure so harshly that they would turn against the Hizb.
We all know how that turned out. In mid-August, after 33 days of extremely destructive actions against Lebanon, Israel finally acceded to a ceasefire and withdrew from Lebanon with its tail between its legs.
Today six years later, we should all recall just how lethal and destructive that war was for the Lebanese people who bore the brunt of the destruction... This evening, we watched a remarkable film, "Under the Bombs", which was set in the ending days of the war and uses a lot of raw, real, contemporary newsreel footage to set the scene for the situation through which the two main characters move. It is an amazing depiction of the immediate postwar days.
For another depiction of what it was like to live through the war, people should buy Rami Zurayk's small book War Diary: Lebanon 2006, which I was proud to publish last year. You can buy it as either a paperback, or a Kindle ebook.
Sarajevo, 1914; Damascus 2012?
The killing, in Damascus today, of at least three powerful members of the Baathist regime in Syria, will almost certainly plunge that whole country-- and quite likely also much of the rest of the Greater Middle East-- into a maelstrom of inter-group violence far worse than any it has seen until now.
Ninety-eight years ago, on June 28, 1914, a small group of Serbian nationalists executed a similar kind of violent coup, killing the presumptive heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife Sophie, during an official visit to Sarajevo, Bosnia. Though the original assassination plan was botched, conspirator Gavrilo Princip was able to shoot the Archduke and his wife dead a short while later.
The process of political/diplomatic breakdown thereby set in process unspooled with amazing speed-- in a context in which major European powers had already, for some years, been arming and escalating tension and distrust among themselves. Within just one month, World War I had erupted-- a confrontation that, though centered in Europe, soon engulfed the whole world, leaving tens of millions dead and tens of millions more displaced, dishonored, starving, and extremely vulnerable to disease.
The killing of President Asad's powerful brother-in-law Assef Shawkat, along with Syria's ministers of defense and interior, certainly escalates the internal tensions and the stakes of the conflict within Syria, a country of 19 million souls in which sectarian tensions and inter-sect violence have already been rising to a high degree over the past 16 months.
Each side to the fierce political battle underway in Syria today accuses the other of having (a) fomented the sectarianism, and (b) launched and escalated the violence; and there is considerable substance to these accusations on both sides. Assad, Shawkat, and most of the important figures in the regime's security apparatus are members of the country's Alawite Muslim minority. The Alawites, who are a branch of Shiism, make up around 12% of the country's population. The opposition forces are almost completely dominated by Sunni Islamist movements. The Sunnis make up around 75% of the country's Arab population. (The remainder are, mainly, Christians. The country also has sizeable populations of non-Arabs, including Kurds, Armenians, and Turkoman; and a very large and vulnerable population of stateless Palestinians.)
Today's killings in Damascus mark the death-knell for the diplomatic initiative that former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has been pursuing. He has, extremely laudably, been trying to find a negotiated end to the conflict in Syria-- one that would include all the major political forces inside the country, along with concerned and influential other governments.
Among Syrians, there have been raucous sounds of jubilation among the oppositionists in exile, and some signs of jubilation among in-country oppositionists-- though it is currently extremely hard to get any news at all out of the country. Until now, there has been no word from President Asad. The Reuters report linked to above said that the armed forces chief of staff, Fahad Jassim al-Freij, "quickly took over as defense minister to avoid giving any impression of official paralysis."
Back in spring 2011, Mona Yacoubian, then an analyst with the (rather poorly named) U.S. Institute of Peace, laid out a plan for "controlled regime change" in Syria. Though she noted that this would not necessarily be an easy feat to achieve, she did nonetheless judge it to be achievable. I questioned her judgment on this point at the time. The events of the intervening 15 months have clearly brought home the lesson (that was clear to me back at the moment she offered her plan) that an action as deepseated and momentous as "regime change" cannot be "controlled", unless there is clear buy-in to the process from the existing status-quo power-- as there was, for example, from the National Party in South Africa in 1992; and as Hillary Clinton is (laudably) hoping to achieve from the Burmese junta today.
A regime that is subjected to the kinds of attacks that Damascus has seen today will have its back to the wall, and that hears from its opponents only the most gruesome and oft-repeated threats of what will happen to its leaders and supporters once they are vanquished, can certainly be expected to retaliate with great violence. The violence inside Syria will get worse; and there will almost certainly be a huge increase in calls for western military intervention...
Meantime, in Israel, here is what the rabidly rightwing analyst Barry Rubin had to say yesterday about the whole phenomenon of the Arab Spring:
"Every Arabic-speaking country is likely to be wracked with internal violence, conflict, disorder and slow socio-economic progress for years, even decades, to come... "
"the big Middle East conflict of the future is not the Arab-Israeli but the Sunni-Shia one... [A] series of conflicts have broken out all along the Sunni-Shia borderland as the two blocs vie for control of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Bahrain.
In addition, the Syrian civil war is wrecking that country and will continue to paralyze it for some time to come. When the dust settles, any new government is going to have to take a while to manage the wreckage, handle the quarreling, diverse ethnic-religious groups, and rebuild its military..."
And that was yesterday!
Of course, all this while-- as throughout the whole of the past 44 years-- Israel's colonial land-grab of the land and resources of Jerusalem, the rest of the West Bank, and Golan has continued. As has its acquisition of ever more capable and lethal military powers... As has its maintenance of Gaza as an extremely tightly policed open-air-prison for 1.6 million people.
The violence in Syria does not just, as U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said today, threaten to "spin out of control". It also threatens to draw powers from near and far into a conflict of still unimaginable proportions and extent. (And the fact that the U.S. has a presidential election this year makes the geopolitics of "controlling" this process much harder to plan.) I imagine that there are plenty of members of Israel's current rightwing and expansionist elite who are hoping and planning that, as this conflict winds down-- whatever its eventual dimensions-- their command over the entire territory of the mashreq (the Arab East) will be far stronger than it is today.
For them, the whole "Iran threat" that their acolytes have hyped to such great effect in the west and much of the rest of the (western dominated) "international community" has always been something of a sideshow... a way, mainly, to divert attention from the colonialist facts they've been busy creating on the ground in the West Bank for the whole of the past 44 years. In regional political terms, Syria was always one of their main targets. It was clearly identified as such in the "Clean Break" document of 1996. And now, they don't even have to lift a finger of their own, in order to see the country being torn apart... with the help of, it has to be said, many cynical sectarian forces from outside-- including from those notably anti-democratic regimes, Saudi Arabia and Qatar...
Can the now-threatening collapse into a tsunami of sectarian violence that may well engulf the whole Middle East be prevented? Yes, it can, if enough people inside and outside the region, seeing both the human tragedy and the geopolitical instability that would ensue, can act together to use all the available tools of diplomacy and human reasonableness that will be needed to avert it.
It is, certainly, harder to see how it can be done in a year when that 5% of humanity who happen to be U.S. citizens are caught up in their (our) own periodic form of money-driven insanity known as a presidential election. But the good of the Syrian people-- all of the Syrian people-- must be the first priority. Determining what that is, and who can legitimately represent the aspirations of the country's people is, of course, a central part of the current conundrum. Saving Syria's people-- and the people of the broader region-- from the kind of sectarian breakdown and violence that we all saw occurring in Iraq over the past seven years... and that I had lived through, first hand, when I was in Lebanon in the late 1970s.. must be the top priority. That requires-- now, as always-- negotiations, including negotiations that draw in and involve the leaders on all sides who have committed some terrible deeds. There are pitifully few angels or innocents in Syria; and none of them are at head of either the current regime, or the opposition. But they are the ones who must be drawn into the negotiation.
That, it seems to me, is the only alternative to a 1914-type explosion of all-out war. And war, remember, inflicts severe harm on everyone who happens to live in the war-zone, with the most vulnerable members of society being (as we have seen in Iraq, and elsewhere) those who suffer the most. From that perspective, avoiding war is a supreme priority for all those concerned with the human rights of actual living people.
* * *
Update, 9:07 pm:
David Ignatius, as well informed as ever, writes this:
The CIA has been working with the Syrian opposition for several weeks under a non-lethal directive that allows the United States to evaluate groups and assist them with command and control. Scores of Israeli intelligence officers are also operating along Syria’s border, though they are keeping a low profile.
West Point military historian denies the net value of a decade of war
The NYT has a very important piece today reporting that the head of the military history program at West Point has openly stated that the United States gained "not much" from 10.5 years of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The program head, Col. Gian Gentile, concluded-- presumably in light of the cost of these wars in both blood and treasure-- that they had been "Certainly not worth the effort. In my view."
A sobering assessment. Especially since the NYT has published it on Memorial Day, the day on which U.S. citizens remember their (our) war dead, a remembrance that can have different emotional overtones depending on whether or not you supported the decisions political leaders made to send those military personnel into action against (and in many cases, in) the targeted foreign countries.
For those who by and large supported those war-initiation decisions (which I did not, in either case), I imagine it might be hard to hear that all the effort and sacrifices that members of the military and their families made may actually have ended up as "not worth the effort."
However, if we are to prevent our political leaders from ever again making quite avoidable and extremely destructive and counter-productive decisions to launch wars against other countries, I don't think we can afford to sentimentalize the human losses that U.S. military families have suffered to the point that we cannot make (or even really hear) the kind of clear-headed assessment that Col. Gentile made in that interview:
- Certainly not worth the effort.
Worth noting there, too: The fact that Col. Gentile is no merely academic egghead. Before serving at West Point he commanded a combat battalion in Baghdad.
Maybe now is a good time for the U.S. public to look back over these past 10.5 years of war-making and consider what might have been done differently, and what the probable or possible effects of such alternative, non-war-based policies might have been... And also, to look at the various hotspots and issues around the world where the (still fairly heavily bellophilic) U.S. political class is still, today, actively discussing the possibility of war or other forms of serious escalation of tensions, such as might very easily lead to war... And to redouble our efforts to explore alternatives to war as a way to meet the security or other forms of concern we have about the behavior of other governments, and the kind of responses our government might make that would aim centrally at de-escalating rather then escalating tensions, and resolving outstanding issues through negotiation, rather than war.
The two main places where people in that toxicly bellophilic space "inside the Washington Beltway" are currently actively discussion escalation and possible war, or "interventions" leading to war, are, of course, Iran and Syria.
It is obvious that regarding these two countries, as regarding the situation in Iraq leading up to March 2003, one of the major forces stoking the bellophilia of members of Congress and its suffocatingly incestuous helpmeets in the MSM has been the pro-Israel lobby. The lobby has effortlessly demonstrated its power in Washington in recent years-- most notably when its shills in Congress orchestrated 29 standing ovations for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu last year-- at a time when Netanyahu had come to Washington to openly confront President Obama's policy on a settlement freeze.
For many months now, the advocacy efforts of the lobby's main arm in Washington, AIPAC, have been strongly focused on stoking tensions with Iran, and ramming through Congress bills mandating an ever tougher U.S. posture toward the country, that have the effect of making the conduct of normal diplomacy with it ever harder and harder... More recently, AIPAC's website has also started to feature the issue of Syria as one deserving of U.S. "intervention". In this latter campaign, AIPAC and the other pro-Israel organizations have been joined by many apparently "liberal" and human-rights-focused organizations, who have been pushing for the kinds of policies "safe havens", "humanitarian corridors", etc, that sound as if they are only humanitarian and dedicated to saving lives but whose major effect would be to further stoke the tensions among the Syrian people that are already running high, and to give a green light and considerable de-facto support to the members of the country's completely unaccountable and deeply Islamist-dominated armed opposition.
Ah, that old illusion of a "war for the sake of human rights"... Where has that led us, before?
Well, back in the 1880s, it led King Leopold of the still-infant "nation" of Belgium into a campaign to conquer and control the whole vast area of what became known as "the Belgian Congo"-- a campaign carried out in good part in the name of "saving those native people from the ravages of the Arab slave traders." Yes, there may well have been some Arab slave traders operating on the far margins of the area that the Belgian forces brought under their control. But the Belgians then instituted in Congo a system of extremely rapacious forced labor and prison camps that led to the death of an estimated 10 million Congolese people over the 23 years that followed...
Indeed, very many wars have been justified by their authors, either at the time or shortly after their initiation, as having a clear and present dimension of the enhancement or protection of rights. (Nobody ever launches an avowedly unjust war, remember. All wars have to seem to be "just" to their authors and supporters.)
In Iraq, as soon as it was clear that the U.S. military were not going to find any actual evidence of the (as it happened, quite illusionary) "WMDs programs" whose presence had been the ostensible cause for which the U.S. public was jerked into the war, Pres. G. W. Bush almost immediately started to rebrand the invasion and war as having been all about human rights.
In Afghanistan, as the war dragged on and on with no clear "victory" in sight, many efforts have been made to rebrand that whole conflict and the United States's huge and expensive military presence there as being in good part an effort to assure the rights of Afghanistan's people, especially its women.
Perhaps people who still have that illusion should read some actual testimonies about the situation and thinking of actual Afghan women, like this poignant and timely one published today by the great, heroic antiwar activist Kathy Kelly, currently in Kabul.
She writes about a meeting at a small, volunteer-run tutoring center with three Afghan mothers-- two of whom have to try to raise their children almost alone while caring for husbands who are disabled..
- Fatima recalls the past winter which was particularly harsh. They couldn’t afford fuel and had to find other ways to keep warm. But Nuria adds that all the seasons present constant problems, and it is always difficult for the family to make ends meet. Asked whether they could recall ever getting a day off from work, the women answered in unison, - “No.”
Asked about the notion that the U.S. is protecting Afghan women, Nekbat said that whatever officials claim in this regard, they are bringing no help. These women have seen no improvement in Afghanistan, and neither, they claim, has anyone they know. They don’t travel in the circles of those most likely to meet and speak with Western journalists, and poverty and the uncertainties of war seem to dictate their lives more surely than any government. They tell me all foreign money is lost to corruption - no one in their communities sees it going to the people.
Although no government official or journalist ever asks them about the conditions they are facing, they know the West is curious; the mothers are aware of the drone aircraft - planes without pilots, some of them armed with missiles, with cameras trained on their neighborhoods.
The drone cameras miss a lot. Nekbat adds that even when people come through to witness firsthand the suffering of common Afghans, she is sure this news never reaches the ears of Karzai and his government. “They don’t care,” she said. “You may perish from lack of food, and still they don’t care. No one hears the poor.”
One hospital in Kabul, the Emergency Surgical Center for Civilian War Victims, serves people free of charge. Emanuele Nannini, the chief logistician for the hospital, reminded us, the previous day, that the U.S. spends one million dollars, per year, for each soldier it deploys in Afghanistan. “Just let six of them go home,” he said, “and with that six million we could meet our total annual operating budget for the 33 existing clinics and hospitals we have in Afghanistan. With 60 less soldiers, the money saved could mean running 330 clinics.”
Strategy, Gentile reminded the NYT interviewer, "should employ resources of a state to achieve policy aims with the least amount of blood and treasure spent."
The NYT article also has, as an intriguing footnote, a quote from Col. John Nagl, who was one of the earliest adopters of, and avdocates for, U.S. use of a 'COIN' (counter-intelligence) strategy in Iraq, and probably elsewhere. Nagl currently teaches at the U.S. Naval Academy, in Annapolis.
U.S. foreign policy, Nagl tells the reporter, should "ensure that we never have to do this again."
The reporter then apparently asks him whether COIN works:
- "Yes," he said. "Is it worth what you paid for it? That's an entirely different question."
Jewish-Israeli public lurches yet further right
I just read Yossi Gurvitz's chilling account of the attack that a right-wing mob in South Tel Aviv unleashed against his girlfriend Galina, and him, during the anti-African-refugees demonstration held there Tuesday. The main speaker at the demo was Michael Ben-Ari, an elected MK.
Gurvitz writes:
- Ben-Ari, a Kahanist, was inciting the crowd against the African refugees in a distinctly anti-Semitic manner, peppering his talk with incessant references to excrement and urine. At some point, Galina couldn’t take it any longer, and shouted something back.
Within minutes we were surrounded by an angry mob of about 20 people, composed mostly of women, who hurled curses at her. Someone pulled out a tear gas canister and waved it at her face.
...Racist and sexual slurs filled the air repeatedly. Time and time again, people expressed the wish she would be raped by Sudanese, and asked her if she was bedding them. A boy, between 10 and 11 years old, screamed at her point blank that what she needs is a “nigger’s cock.”
Gurvitz has worked for many years as an economics/financial reporter. He makes this point in his article:
- Neither the government not the Tel Aviv Municipality invested in their slums the resources necessary to improve them. Once, more than 30 years ago, Menachem Begin led the Neighborhood Reconstruction project, which held great promise before Begin abandoned it in favor of another, the occupation of the West Bank.
The government announced this week it will raise the VAT, the most regressive tax, most harmful to the poor, to 17 percent, and that it would also place VAT on fruit and vegetables. Which means the expenses of the Hatikva residents is about to skyrocket. On the same day, the Knesset approved a bill providing tax cuts to people contributing to settlements. Yesterday, the Knesset approved NIS 161 million to ultra-Orthodox institutions, NIS 1.7 million for the bureau of convicted rapist Moseh Katzav – WTF? – but declined to give NIS 4.2 million to centers aiding victims of sexual assault, which may lead to their closure.
With the exception of the years of the second Rabin government, this has been the government’s policy for 35 years: create a welfare state – in the West Bank. The government of Greater Israel does not have the money for welfare in old Israel, it is busy making facts on the ground beyond the Green Line. And if you want to make facts on the ground, you need settlers. The ideological base is limited. You need to entice people to go there. You want a welfare state? Better move to Beit El.
Some western media have taken to calling the African residents there "migrants"-- as though they were birds, not humans? Or, as though they were on their way someplace else?
What most of the international community calls them is refugees. Most of them have fled great violence and repression in their home countries and have made their way across daunting (and often lethal) obstacles, to try to find a refuge where they can. Refugees who can register a credible claim of fearing serious harm if they return to their homelands are afforded special protections under international law. I need hardly add that in the past, many Jewish people have been refugees, and have benefitted from these protections.
But for many of the Jewish citizens in today's Israel, the term "refugees" reminds them less of the vulnerabilities that members of their own community have suffered in the past-- which might excite some compassion from them?-- than of the very numerous Palestinian refugees still awaiting the full respect of their rights, from Israel. Thus, treating the African refugees as, essentially subhuman beings not endowed with full, normal human rights, is all of a piece with the fact that Israel has treated the Palestinian refugees like that for 64 long years now.
Then, there are the calls that arise from the mob and its leaders for "expulsion". In what other even half-way civilized country in the world do we ever hear elected politicians and the mobs that support them openly voicing such a call?
None.
The ethnic (indigenous) Palestinians who make up 20% of the citizenry of Israel have long feared that rightwing Israeli politicians may some day start yet another campaign of ethnic cleansing, designed to "finish off" the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their land that was started in late 1947. The 4.2 million Palestinians of the areas that have lived under Israeli military rule since 1967 also fear the same fate.
From this point of view, the pro-expulsion campaign being whipped up by so many ultra-nationalist politicians against the African refugees in Tel Aviv can be seen as a way of "grooming" the Jewish-Israeli public, to be ready to set aside any remaining inclination some of its members (like Gurvitz and the truly heroic Galina) may have to treat non-Jews as fellow-humans and to resist any campaign to demonize, attack, and eventually expel or kill them.
It's like pedophiles, who will spend long months "grooming" their young victims to commit acts that, without the grooming, they would almost certainly find distasteful and demeaning. The dedicated pedophile will spend that time pushing the child's moral limits ever further and further, until the child finds the acts s/he is then forced or "encouraged" to commit no longer so distasteful or abnormal...
The government of Israel must take the full responsibility for bringing these vile acts of hatred and incitement to an end. The African refugees in Israel are deserving of, and must receive, full protection of their physical security and their basic wellbeing.
If the government does not do this, it should be vilified around the world. Certainly, other governments everywhere should withhold their support from a government that does not clamp down hard on the racist inciters, and that refuses to offer basic protections to the refugees.
There has long been a broad discussion over whether Zionism itself constitutes racism. (It turns out that a lot of the answer that people give to that question hangs on whether they think racism deals only with differences in skin color-- which most US citizens seem to think-- or whether, as the other 95% of the world's people believe, it also deals with other forms of ethnic difference.) But the actions of the mob-- and its leaders-- in Tel Aviv this week were clear, unabashed, and definitely proto-fascist racism.
----
... What was Peter Beinart's argument, again, about Zionism being "democratic and liberal" inside 1948 Israel, and only undemocratic and illiberal in the occupied territories?
Beinart's latest book, The Crisis of Zionism, is very good in its analysis of the dysfunctionalities within the American Jewish community and the complete unrepresentativity of the community's self-proclaimed "leadership". That is a story that he knows well, and understands. The real story of Israel is one that, evidently, he does not yet really understand.
The rhythms of blogging and other work
I had a great, though short, get-together with Josh Foust today. Josh is a top-notch analyst of the United States' various interventions(!) in Afghanistan and the other 'Stans over the past ten years. His work first came to my notice back in my old 'heavy-blogging' days-- let's say, in around 2007-08. At that time, he was blogging very heavily at an excellent group blog called Registan.net. I've always found his work very clear, very grounded, evidence-based, often quirky, forthright, smart, and not at all marked by the politically motivated punch-pulling that distorts so much of what passes for "analysis" in the U.S. commentatoriat.
In 2010, when I founded Just World Books with the aim of (among other things) working with some of the bloggers whose work I most admire, to have them curate their own best work into book chapters, and then into books, Josh was one of the first whom I approached. He agreed. And the result was his book Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net, a super book that still holds up really well today.
I never met Josh in person until the time came to sign the book contract... let's say, maybe May of 2010? At that point, I needed to have his mailing address-- and discovered to my amazement that he actually lived in my hometown of Charlottesville. I mean, how crazy was that?? So we met at the local Whole Foods store to sign the contract.
Soon thereafter, he moved up to live in that big expanse of northern Virginia that abuts DC directly. We met a few times at the time the book came out; and then again around a year ago when he came back to Charlottesville to take part in the JWB-organized panel discussion at the March 2011 Virginia Festival of the Book... But really, I haven't spent much time with him in the "real" world at all since his book came out. I've encountered him a lot in the Twittersphere, where he has a massive presence. But that's still not the same as sitting down in a room together and bouncing impressions, analyses, and ideas off other, which is what we did today. He's been working for a while now at the American Security Project, where his work is still really smart, and he still blogs from time to time at Registan, writes for the Atlantic (including this fabulous recent piece, titled "The Annals of Chicken Diplomacy"-- I told you he can be quirky).
So we were talking. I'd taken him a copy of our latest book, Matt Zeller's very moving epistolary memoir Watches Without Time: An American Soldier in Afghanistan-- which Josh was good enough to write a short endorsement (blurb) for. Josh looked at the cover and said he was jealous: that we'd given Matt a much better cover than the one we gave him. Okay, it is sort of true. Back in 2010 the company was still was at the very beginning. We've learned a lot along the way!
But when I got home, I realized it was me who was feeling a bit jealous. Josh still manages to do plenty of blogging-- and with all the demands of this book publishing business, I barely get any time to blog at all these days! (Okay, the business plus the grandchildren. But mainly, I confess, the business.)
So that was why, this evening, I decided to sit down and write a bit about the way that blogging has assumed a different rhythm at different points in the last nine years of my life, and how I feel about it.
Back at the beginning, when I started blogging in February 2003, it was so deliriously exciting! This idea that any of us with internet access, wherever we were, could publish our thoughts and our interactions without the mediation of any editors, press barons, or other representatives of institutions and the status quo! We could have real, interactive written 'conversations' across national boundaries-- in near real time. We could learn from some of those amazing Iraqi people who were blogging in English as well as Arabic, what it was like to be living with their families in a society being targeted by intensive U.S. military bombardment. This was unprecedented. I believed then-- and I believe now-- that it has changed something fundamental about the nature of warfare, forever. Sure, the "smart" bombardier now tries to use all his tricks to disable the internet in the place being bombarded-- as in Gaza in 2008-09, or in Lebanon 30 months earlier. But still, that kind of internet silencing can never be complete. The stories will always find one way or another of getting out. Put simply, we are no longer in the 19th century; and heavy-duty military powers can no longer wage the kinds of brutal, anti-humane campaigns of bombardment, intimidation, and genocide that the colonial powers waged so regularly throughout that century and the two preceding it. (Why on earth did Samantha Power think that genocide started only in the 20th century? What terrible historical blinders she wears... )
So yes, it was exciting, and it was wonderful, and it was hopeful. But that blogging also took up a lot of time. I have huge admiration for the two "doyens" of the community of English-language, professorial bloggers concentrating on the Middle East: Juan Cole, and As'ad Abou-Khalil... Even though I don't always agree with either of them; still I have huge respect for the sheer grit of their commitment to their blogging. (Which can be a burden and an addiction-- and in my experience was frequently both at the same time.) And appreciation, too, for the somewhat different kinds of expertise that each brings to his blogging, and for their commitment to sharing it.
By 2009, I was ready for various reasons to reorder my priorities. I decided I wanted to spend the next phase of my life doing something to build an institution, rather than continuing to pursue the somewhat lonely calling of an independent writer. My first foray into doing something "institutional" was, as many JWN readers may recall, the distinctly unhappy experience of working with the folks at the Council for the National Interest. It turned out to be an extremely dysfunctional organization that was ravaged by many of the worst shortcomings of small nonprofits, and a "President" at the time who completely overstepped the boundaries of his (in truth, very limited and "ceremonial") role under the bylaws, refusing to let me do the job I had been hired to do, as Executive Director.
I have banged my forehead against so many glass ceilings in the course of my career that at that point, as a very experienced professional in her late 50s, I simply said "No more!" To heck with all those institutions run by older guys who are quite incapable of recognizing women's capacity for leadership. I do not need that kind of grief and humiliation any more in my life. I would, I decided, build my own institution... And that, in a nutshell, is a big part of the reason that I decided to found the book-publishing company, Just World Books.
One of the costs of having done this has been that I've been working so hard that really, I haven't had much time or energy left over to get into what I call the "blogging zone"... that is, the mindset and the mental space from whence it is possible to blog. Sometimes, it hasn't even felt possible or easy to tweet, for goodness' sake-- and we all know how much less mental energy that takes, than blogging.
But it's still kind of nice to know that JWN is still here for when I do want to blog. And I'm thinking the time may well come when I'm not throwing so much of myself into the book publishing, that I might want to get back to doing more blogging again. Including, perhaps, more blogging from on-the-ground reporting various places around the world. Who knows? What I do know-- something I first learned when I was a single working mother with two small children, and writing my first two books-- is that a person cannot do everything she wants to do in life, all at once. I have been blessed to be able to do a large number of different, very meaningful things in y life so far... but not all at once.
As of now, I'm pushing 60, and I'm in good health. Let's say I have decent shot of being able to do productive and interesting things for another 25 years. So in the course of those 25 years, I can do any number of additional interesting and meaningful things. Yes, I want to be able to spend good time with the grandchildren and the rest of our family. Yes, I may have a couple more books in me. Yes, I may decide to get into some real, on-the-ground social-justice activism. Yes, I may take time out for reflection and spiritual recharging. Yes, there may be many things I can do whose nature we cannot even dream of yet! (I mean, two decades ago, who could ever have imagined the possibility of being a "blogger"?)
And in the meantime, I really love this publishing business! Working with ten fabulous authors, Just World Books has now created eleven really fabulous books-- and if I hadn't worked with these authors, almost none of these books would ever have existed... Or, they wouldn't have existed in exactly this form... And certainly, they wouldn't have come to life in such a timely fashion. Speedy turnaround of excellent manuscripts is one of JWB's biggest commitments-- and it is one of the things that has kept me and my key layout person working late into the evenings for most of the past week, in pursuit of getting speedy, high-quality production of Matt Zeller's important book.
So anyway... it does feel good getting back into the blogging zone here, this evening. I'll try to keep checking back into it. (Yes, I still have a heck of a lot to say about what's been going on in the world!)
And I invite all of you who are still reading JWN to come visit me in my book-publishing zone, too. In particular, all the support you can give to my great authors by actually buying and recommending their books would be most appreciated! You can do that, at the JWB webstore, here.
The vulnerability of Palestinian refugees, revisited
I'm looking forward to seeing my old friend-- and now Just World Books's latest author-- Jonathan Randal, who'll be flying in to DC from Paris on Saturday. We've arranged for a bunch of public and less-public events for him next week, in both DC and New York. You can find the schedule for the public events here.
Please do share that with all your friends.
When I was a cub reporter in Beirut back in the 1970s, Randal was one of my mentors. By then, he was already the Washington Post's senior foreign correspondent. He and a bunch of other senior journos came in to Beirut to cover the civil war that started there in 1975, many of them coming in almost directly from Vietnam.
He and a bunch of other journos and I worked hard to understand what was going on during the often complex and fast-moving events of the civil war. We all had our share of ducking snipers' bullets, dealing with the facts of our own fears and mortality, and losing friends and colleagues during the war. We also had to cover plenty of the war's atrocities. The worst one I had to cover was the Phalangist militia's siege and final storming of the Palestinian refugee camp at Tel al-Zaatar. Phalangist militia boss Bashir Gemayyel, who led the assault on the camp, even organized a press tour of the fall camp the day after it had fallen. It was a truly sickening and very difficult trip. The Phalangist-led caravan of western journos' cars wound its way up the hill into the remains of the camp amidst a stream of pickups and other small vehicles driven by Phalangist supporters, each of whom had a small paper that they waved to get in, which was a "license to loot"-- loot, that is, the pathetic amount of personal belongings the refugees had been able to amss in their shelters there but had now been forced to leave behind.
And as those cars and pickups ground their way up the hill, they were driving right over some of bodies of refugees-- mostly, women and children-- who had been killed as they tried to flee the days before. And those bodies were pancaked so thin by the traffic it took me a seeing a few before I figured what they were.
Oh, and before he took the journos into the camp, Gemayyel held a little press conference in Phalangist headquarters, at which he assured us-- I have my news report of this still to hand-- that "I am proud of what you're going to see inside the camp."
... I could give ore details of what I saw (and smelled, and heard, and felt under my feet) inside the camp, but I guess you get my drift.
That was in 1976. We all reported what the Phalangists did after the fall of Tel al-Zaatar. Six years later, in 1982, I was in U.S. (but Jon Randal was still in Beirut.) In June that year the Israelis launched a large-scale assault on Lebanon, with some help from their Phalangist allies... Then, in mid-September that year, after the PLO fighters had all left the country as per an agreement brokered by Pres. Reagan's personal envoy Phil Habib, the IDF advanced into West Beirut (quite in violation of the Habib agreement)... and then they brought Phalangist fighters in, in trucks, to "take control" of the completely undefended Palestinian refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila. The Phalangists committed their worst atrocities ever during 48 hours of killing in the camps...
There was still a fairly active peace movement in Israel in those days. As news of the Sabra and Shatila massacres emerged, the peaceniks took to the streets. They-- and the mounting international diplomatic pressure on Israel-- were enough to force the IDF to pull the Phalangists out of the camps and slink away. Some months later, Israel held a public inquiry into the massacres, called the Kahan Commission. Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, who was the main architect of both the war and the Sabra and Shatila actions, told the commission that he "never expected the Phalangists would behave so badly in the camps."
What a liar.
(The commission censured him and said he should never be allowed to hold high office in Israel again. We know how that went, right?)
... Jon Randal wrote about Tel al-Zaatar, and Sabra and Shatila in a book he published on the Phalangists in 1983. I am really proud that this year, on the 30th anniversary of Sabra and Shatila, my company is publishing a new edition of the book, along with a new Preface.
This is the book that Jon will be discussing during his events in Washington DC and New York next week. Come if you can!
