'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Afghanistan's election: Some reflections

Back in 2004-05, Pres. Bush and his people were trying to 're-brand' America's overseas military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq as being part of a campaign to bring the wonderful fruits of democracy to various peoples around the world. At the tip of a cruise missile, no less... Oh my goodness how tragic and wrongheaded every single step along this way has been...

Thus we had the sudden emergence of the phenomenon of the 'purple finger'. Images of those people emerging from voting booths with their purple-stained digits were flashed around the world. (And one purple digiteer even got to attend Bush's State of the Union Address in January 2006, I seem to recall. 'Our' achievement there...)

Today, the people of Afghanistan went to the polls for their second nationwide election since the U.S.-led invasion of their country in 2001. I've been following the reporting from there via Twitter's #Afghan10 hashtag. Canadian journo Naheed Mustafa tweeted "I'm not convinced it's all worth it for 40% turnout and little legitimacy." She linked to this piece of serious-looking reporting from the ever-professional folks at McClatchy.

Mustafa is quite right to take seriously the legitimacy angle, since that above all is what the U.S. government seeks to gain from a 'successful' holding of the election. Of course, Afghanistan's 30 million people probably have different meta-goals... which quite likely would include there-- as in other war-torn countries-- the goal that election result in the formation of a stable and accountable national government that can lead a successful process of internal reconciliation while rapidly building up its ability to deliver basic services to the Afghan people.

Right. I imagine many Afghan citizens have had the opportunity to see what has happened in Iraq since the (technically more or less 'successful') holding of the nationwide election there back in early March.

In Iraq, the four large political blocs have still not been able to come to agreement on forming their new government, more than six months later. And in the absence of any new governing authority having emerged, the caretaker government of PM Nouri al-Maliki is still limping along. The security situation continues to be terrible, with large-scale suicide bombings still happening every couple of weeks. And the delivery of other basic services like clean water, electricity, banking services, etc etc, continues to be performed at levels considerably worse than what Iraq's people enjoyed back in the 1970s.

A technically 'successful' election guarantees nothing in terms of quality of governance; and therefore nothing in terms of people actually being able to enjoy the basic rights of citizenship.

... Ah, but here in the U.S., Pres. Obama has been continuing to trumpet the arguments that what has been happening in both Iraq and Afghanistan somehow represent the "progress" that he promised and that he still hopes to embody. regarding Iraq, he has been careful not to engage in the kind of jejune "Mission Accomplished" triumphalism that Pres. Bush used to revel in. But still, as the August 31 deadline for the "end of U.S. combat operations" in Iraq went by, Obama did his best to describe that milestone-- which was not actually such a real milestone at all-- as marking something that the U.S. had indeed 'accomplished.' Um, well, the timetable leading toward a complete withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq is one that was agreed between the Bush administration and PM Maliki's government in Iraq back in November 2008. So if Obama is saying that he has been trying to stick to the U.S.'s promises in that regard (well, more or less), than is that really anything to trumpet as an "accomplishment"? Shouldn't nations and governments be expected as a matter of course to live up their international commitments?

I believe Obama could and should have done a lot more to remind people in the U.S. and overseas that it was a national (and Republican-initiated) commitment he was living up to in Iraq. And he still could and should be doing a lot more to engage all the international community-- including, of course, all six of Iraq's neighbors-- in a joint effort to underline the value of Iraq's territorial unity and independence, and to offer all support for the speedy formation of a stable and empowered national government there.

And then there is Afghanistan, which is currently much more "Obama's war" than Iraq is or ever has been. After all, Obama supported the original U.S. invasion of Afghanistan (as he did not, of Iraq); and he was also, last winter, the president who made the solemn decision to undertake a new surge of American forces there.

Today, the WaPo had a very significant piece of reporting by Karen DeYoung, in which she just about confirmed what I have been arguing for 10 months now, namely that the whole "strategy" according to which Obama had decided to undertake the Afghan surge was one directed much more at U.S. domestic audiences than at making any actual, definable strategic gains on the ground in Afghanistan.

DeYoung wrote:

Despite discouraging news from Afghanistan and growing doubts in Congress and among the American public, the Obama administration has concluded that its war strategy is sound and that a December review, once seen as a pivotal moment, is unlikely to yield any major changes.

This resolve arises amid a flurry of reports from outside experts and former officials who are convinced that the administration's path in Afghanistan is unsustainable and its objectives are unclear. Lawmakers from both parties are insisting that they be given a bigger say in assessing the war's trajectory.

The White House calculus is that the strategy retains enough public and political support to weather any near-term objections. Officials do not expect real pressure for progress and a more precise definition of goals to build until next year, with the approach of a July deadline President Obama has set for decisions on troop withdrawals and the beginning of the 2012 electoral season...

How solipsistic can a country and a (democratically elected) government become? There seems to be literally no limit.

Finally, of course, I cannot leave this short reflection on U.S. policies and the push toward purple fingerism in distant countries under the sway of the U.S. without some quick reference to what happened in Egypt and Palestine after the U.S. had successfully lobbied-- back in 2005 and early 2006-- for the holding of 'democratic' elections in both countries. In Egypt, the opposition Muslim Brotherhood did considerably better than the U.S. had expected, and Pres. Mubarak thereafter moved back into his traditionally repressive mode with no further U.S. intervention in the matter... And after Hamas won the free and fair elections in Palestine in January 2006... Well, I guess I don't have to remind many JWN readers about what happened there.

Just World Books website is born!

Okay, I know I've been promising my readers here that the JWB website will be published "any day now"... And the day is here! So head on over and check out the site's many great features and the fast-growing amount of content we have there! (Now including two podcasts already-- one featuring JWB author Laila El-Haddad... the great advance praise Chas Freeman's book has been receiving from a wide range of people, etc etc.)

Right, I know if you click on any of the "Buy Book" buttons at this point you'll discover that that we don't have any actual books yet. They will come! I am planning to have Chas Freeman's book ready for sale on or before October 1... and after that, the three other titles on our Fall 2010 list will all be coming out at 2- to 3-week intervals.

The website has a newsfeed with RSS attached, so you can click on that little range RSS icon to get the latest up-to-date news from the site. Or even better: you can sign up for the Just World Books newsletter, which will be a fortnightly emailed update in which I outline the latest developments in our pretty hectic publishing schedule.

Well, I guess now that the JWB site is up, I shan't need to keep putting JWB news onto the blog here... and I know I need to get back to doing more regular blogging.

But I'd really love it if all of you loyal JWN readers could spread the news about Just World Books and its activities as widely as possible! Thanks!

Chas Freeman calls for European, Arab activism on Israeli-Palestinian peace

The experienced American diplomatist Chas W. Freeman, Jr, has issued a strong call for European and Arab states to work together to ensure speedy attainment of Israeli-Palestinian peace, arguing that "Only a peace process that is protected from Israel's ability to manipulate American politics can succeed."

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.

The Iraqi skeleton in America's closet

In popular English-language parlance, a "skeleton in the closet" is a dirty family secret that everyone likes to keep hidden.

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".

End-of-August Open Thread

I'm on a short vacation with the family. Until I can resume posting here, I'll moderate your comments and post the sensible ones. (If I get the internet connection and the time to do so, that is.)

Building 'Just World Books'

This is kind of a "what I've been doing this summer". Yes, I have felt intermittently guilty that I haven't done more JWN blogging. One item in particular I wish I'd blogged about was the passing, last weekend, of Tony Judt. (However, numerous other people have been more eloquent in explaining the depth of the loss that Judt's passing represents than I could have been. Check these two posts-- from Steve Walt and 'Sepoy' [Manan Ahmed]-- and follow the links in them wherever they lead... )

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!

Obama reining in anti-Iran militarists?

David Ignatius had an extremely important piece in today's WaPo, in which he reported on a small-group interview in which Pres. Obama spoke about Iran in a way that seemed calculated to rein in the numerous militarists who still populate some of the upper reaches of his administration (though notably not the Department of Defense.)

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.

'Ethnic cleansing 101' for Israeli high-schoolers

The ever-dogged Max Blumenthal has a deeply disturbing post on his blog about the fact that, when the Israeli security forces destroyed an entire village of (ethnic Palestinian) Israeli civilians in al-Arakib, in the Negev, last week, they bussed in a bunch of Jewish Israeli high-school students to help them perform (and cheer on) that gross act of ethnic cleansing.

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.

Arrest campaign against Syrian citizens in occupied Golan

The Syrian citizens who live in Israeli-occupied Golan don't get nearly as much international media coverage as the Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza. But the situation they live in is just about equally harsh. Indeed ever since Israel committed a unilateral (and globally quite unrecognized) act of Anschluss against Golan in 1980, the situation of Golan's legitimate, indigenous residents has been as tough as that of the legitimate, indigenous residents of occupied East Jerusalem.

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 investment in Israel plunged in 2009

Haaretz today:

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.