Algeria and the hostage-takers

The PBS Newshour reports on this past week's hostage crisis, Accounting for Algeria Hostages as Mali Conflict Intensifies 01/18/2013:

The Algerian civil war of the 1990s against Islamist extremists was a major event in the world of Islamist politics in recent decades. The Islamist party Islamic Salvation Front (Front Islamique du Salut/FIS) had won a national election in 1991 and were set to win a majority in Parliament on the second round of balloting, but the Algerian army cancelled the election that was set to take place in 1992. Violent conflict raged throughout the 1990s, claiming up to 100,000 lives.

Robert Fisk tells the story of that civil war in a chapter in his highly informative The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (2005). Hostage-taking by Islamist fighters and the use of death squads and brutal tactics by the Algerian army were commonplace. He reports there than in 1994, the Algerian government, founded in a guerrilla war against France in 1954-62:

Within a year, the government was sending a delegation of high-ranking Algerian army intelligence officers on a tour of Arab capitals, notably Cairo and Damascus, in the hope of learning how to combat "Islamist" guerrilla armies. In Egypt - where real Islamists had killed President Sadat - they learned how Egypt's paramilitary police stormed the hideouts of armed insurgents in the sugarcane fields around Assiout and Beni Suef before interrogating the survivors under torture or hanging them after sentences in military courts. In Damascus, they learned first-hand of how Syrian special forces with artillery and tanks killed thousands of Muslims in the rebellious city of Hama in 1982, pulverising its ancient streets and mosques. At the end of December 1994, the Algerian army staged an identical assault on the Muslim stronghold around Aïn Defla - about the same size as Hama -with artillery and tanks, and slaughtered up to 3,000 alleged GIA [armed Islamist group] men. Again, there were no prisoners. (p. 546)

Fisk recalled that history this week in It sounds like a replay of Algeria’s civil war. Don’t bet on a happy ending The Independent 01/16/2013:

Colonial frontiers, as we all know, mean more to the colonisers than the indigenous population. Tribes cross our old borders because they do not believe in them. If you are a Berber or a Touareg, you can be both a Malian or an Algerian or – more to the point – a Maghrebian. And the Maghreb stretches from Morocco across Mauretania and Algeria to Tunisia and Libya and, to many inhabitants, all points south.

The Algerian army know this very well. They spent nine years fighting their own Islamist insurgents, constantly claiming that "foreigners" were involved in the war. And Algeria’s military legions dealt with their enemies cruelly and without quarter. The French still suspect that Algerian troops killed French hostage priests during a failed attempt to liberate them – and then beheaded the corpses to suggest that Islamists murdered them.

And in Algeria: the slaughter of the good and bad at the In Amenas gas plant was utterly predictable 01/17/2013. This one gives some good context to the PBS report above:

Opaque as Algeria's military may appear to foreigners, its foundational myths – of utter brutality towards its enemies, whatever the cost – have appealed to the Pentagon and to the French, who both maintained their co-operation with the army's elite at Cherchell outside Algiers in the 1990s – when they knew full well that the country's soldiers and paramilitary forces were indulging in an orgy of torture against insurgents and civilians.

Three things were certain last night about the Algerian bloodbath; that the Algerians will put the entire blame for the killing of the hostages upon the al-Qa'ida-inspired kidnappers, that the Western governments whose citizens died will go along with this – and not utter a word of condemnation of the Algerian military – and that by midday today, the entire story will change out of all recognition. Prime ministers, foreign ministers and newsdesks beware.

David Cameron's total ignorance of the Algerian government's inherent cruelty led Downing Street to mutter some truly stupid remarks today. The Algerians, they said, “seemed determined to lead the way”.

You bet they did. Talking to hostage-takers is anathema to them, at best a means to wear down kidnappers before annihilating them. [my emphasis]

He also adds this bit of history about Algerian Islamists:

For the real marriage of both al-Qa'ida and the Algerian military started after the Russian occupation of Afghanistan.

It is a largely secret story which even today has never been fully revealed. Desperate to stem their losses, the Soviet government asked their socialist Algerian allies for intelligence help; and the Algerian intelligence services dispatched their own men to Afghanistan to pose as "mujahedin" alongside real Algerian Islamists fighting for Osama bin Laden.

Information from these Algerian military spies allowed Soviet forces to fight back.

But when the Russians left and the Algerians came home, the army ordered their own men to remain undercover with the Islamist groups. So when the terrible civil war began, individual officers to keep their cover participated in the massacre of civilians. And thus became contaminated by atrocities. This is not a tale which the Algerian government admits to. Nor will the West examine this grim history. [my emphasis]

And yet again in Algeria, Mali, and why this week has looked like an obscene remake of earlier Western interventions 01/18/2013:

From the Middle East, the whole thing looks like an obscene television remake of our preposterous interventions in other parts of the world. French troops will be in Mali for only "several weeks", Hollande and his cronies tell us. Isn't that what we said when British troops first appeared on the streets of Northern Ireland, and then spent decades fighting there? Isn't that what the Israelis said when they marched into Lebanon in 1982 and stayed for another 18 years? Isn't this what we thought when we invaded Afghanistan? That our chaps might not even hear a shot fired in anger?

... But why are "we", the West, in Mali? How many readers – hands up, oh virtuous and honest folk, could actually name the capital of Mali two weeks ago?

The capital of Mali is Bamako, by the way.

Fisk has a sense of history: "Do I sniff a bit of old-fashioned colonial insanity here? Carry on up the Niger? French troops battle rebels. 'Terrorists' in retreat. Daily headlines from 1954 until 1962. In a country called Algeria. And I promise you, the French didn't win that war."

Tags: algeria, robert fisk

Israel's new Gaza offensive and risks to the US

Robert Fisk offers his unsentimental view of the new Gaza war in Hamas and Israel have opened the 'gates of hell' in Gaza yet again. And the number of journalistic cliches in hell is growing by the day The Independent 11/18/2012.

Why Americans, including many military leaders and thinkers, seem to consider Israel a model in fighting terrorism, I have never been able to quite figure out. Because their terrorism problems never seem to end. As Fisk puts it:

Terror, terror, terror, terror, terror. Here we go again. Israel is going to "root out Palestinian terror" – which it has been claiming to do, unsuccessfully, for 64 years – while Hamas, the latest in "Palestine's" morbid militias, announces that Israel has "opened the gates of hell" by murdering its military leader, Ahmed al-Jabari. [my emphasis]

I find the current Israeli operation against Gaza yet another sign that the ever-receding "two-state solution" is gone as an option. Israel controls Gaza and the West Bank and dominates them as a nasty colonial master. Within the borders of "Greater Israel", Palestinians will soon outnumber Jewish Israelis, meaning that Israel will face the real choice of ceasing to be a Jewish state or ceasing to be a democracy.

This is the alternative about which Jimmy Carter warned in Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (2008). Here is the full text of the Carter Center press release, Carter Center Calls for End to Gaza Violence 11/14/2012:

The Carter Center condemns rocket fire from Gaza against Israeli communities, the assassination of Ahmed Jabari, head of the Hamas military wing, and other targeted attacks in Gaza.

"Both sides should cease all hostilities," said former President Jimmy Carter. "Israel should end its blockade of Gaza, and Western countries should work to facilitate reconciliation between Hamas and their Palestinian rival, Fatah. As long as Gaza remains isolated, the situation in and around Gaza will remain volatile."

Fisk writes:

But is there nothing to stop this nonsense, this garbage war? Hundreds of rockets fall on Israel. True. Thousands of acres of land are stolen from Arabs by Israel –for Jews and Jews only – on the West Bank. There isn’t even enough land left there now for a Palestinian state.

Delete the last two sentences, please. There are only good guys and bad guys in this outrageous conflict in which the Israelis claim to be the good guys to the applause of Western countries (who then wonder why a lot of Muslims don’t like Westerners very much).

The problem, oddly, is that Israel’s actions in the West Bank and its siege of Gaza are bringing closer the very event which Israeli trumpets it fears every day: that Israel faces destruction.

I assume here that what Fisk means by "Israel faces destruction" is the alternative just described: Jewish state or democracy, but not both. Hamas does not have the capability to destroy Israel, nor does any other country in the Middle East. Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons and what is generally recognized as the best army in the area. No state or combination of states can credibly threaten the existence of Israel as such.

But, as Fisk also observes, the Arab Awakening has created new conditions for both Israel and the US in the Middle East:

The Arab awakening now takes its own path: its leaders are going to have to follow their public’s mood. So, I suspect, is poor old King Abdullah of Jordan. America’s clowning for "peace" on Israel’s side is no longer worth the candle among Arabs. And if Benjamin Netanyahu believes that the arrival of the first Iranian Fajr rockets necessitates the Israeli big bang on Iran, and then Iran fires back – and perhaps at the Americans, too– and brings in Hezbollah – and Obama gets swallowed up in another Western-Muslim war, what happens then?

Well, Israel will ask for a ceasefire, as it routinely does in wars against Hezbollah. It will plead yet again for the undying support of the West in its struggle against world evil, Iran included.

Israel's new war on Gaza is going to further damage the image of Israel and its US partner in the Middle East, the Muslim world, and much of the non-Muslim world. Eleven years after the 9/11 attacks, America's image in the Middle East and the Muslim world is, if anything, worse than it was then. Americans are still asking, "Why do they hate us?"

President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Obama blandly reasserted Israel's right to defend itself, which no one questions, and is apparently doing little or nothing to try to end the current conflict. As Glenn Greenwald tweeted on 11/17/2012, "Maybe now we can start to accept that Obama's policies are because he believes in them, not because he's 'forced' to adopt them #IsraelGaza."

Juan Cole looks at some ways that Israli military action in Gaza could complicate US foreign policy in a number of ways in Could a Gaza Land War lose the Middle East for America? Informed Comment 11/19/2012.

Tags: israel, gaza offensive, robert fisk

Robert Fisk on the Syrian civil war and the US-British game there

Robert Fisk has shown himself over the last two decades to be one of the very best reporters on Middle Eastern affairs, especially when it comes to wars. His book The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (2005) is a great primer on the involvement of the West in the oil heartlands of the Middle East, the conflict that Andrew Bacevich calls The Long 20th Century. Fisk's book is also an unusually good read.

In Syrian war of lies and hypocrisy The Independent 07/29/2012, Fisk writes of the current situation where Western allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar fund and arm Sunni rebels in Syria:

Has there ever been a Middle Eastern war of such hypocrisy? A war of such cowardice and such mean morality, of such false rhetoric and such public humiliation? I'm not talking about the physical victims of the Syrian tragedy. I'm referring to the utter lies and mendacity of our masters and our own public opinion – eastern as well as western – in response to the slaughter, a vicious pantomime more worthy of Swiftian satire than Tolstoy or Shakespeare.

Foreign policy runs to a large degree on conventional hypocrisy. But sometimes the level of hypocrisy required to sustain a given policy can cause problems of its own, as we've seen in many ways in US involvement in the Middle East:

President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, say they want a democracy in Syria. But Qatar is an autocracy and Saudi Arabia is among the most pernicious of caliphate-kingly-dictatorships in the Arab world. Rulers of both states inherit power from their families – just as Bashar has done – and Saudi Arabia is an ally of the Salafist-Wahabi rebels in Syria, just as it was the most fervent supporter of the medieval Taliban during Afghanistan's dark ages. [my emphasis]

Qatar may allow Aljazeera to broadcast from its territory as long as it stays away from embarrassing reporting about Qatar, but neither Qatar nor our Saudi friends are likely to be keen on having democratic government in Syria.

The government of Syria is based on the support of the ʿAlawī minority which practices a variety of Islam often taken to be a variety of Shi'a Islam. ʿAlawī Islam as a distinct trend dates back to the 10th and 11th century. Their classical theology involves a variety of trinitarianism, not that God is three Persons as in the Christian doctrine but that God manifests himself in triads in history. Urban ʿAlawīs tend to be closer to the Twelver Shi'a than their rural co-religionists are.

Iran has been Syria's most important regional ally based in no small part on sectarian solidarity, though thanks to the US invasion of Iraq, the Shi'a government of Iraq is now an important regional friend of the regime, as well.

There is a mistake in Fisk article as of this writing. It quotes President Obama as saying, "Given the regime's stockpiles of nuclear weapons ..." The actual statement from his 07/23/2012 speech to the VFW was about chemical weapons: "And given the regime’s stockpiles of chemical weapons, we will continue to make it clear to Assad and those around him that the world is watching, and that they will be held accountable by the international community and the United States, should they make the tragic mistake of using those weapons."

But Fisk turns a jaded but not cynical eye on this situation. He certainly seems to care what happens in this region (Fisk lives in Lebanon):

But what US administration would really want to see Bashar's atrocious archives of torture opened to our gaze? Why, only a few years ago, the Bush administration was sending Muslims to Damascus for Bashar's torturers to tear their fingernails out for information, imprisoned at the US government's request in the very hell-hole which Syrian rebels blew to bits last week. Western embassies dutifully supplied the prisoners' tormentors with questions for the victims. Bashar, you see, was our baby.

Then there's that neighbouring country which owes us so much gratitude: Iraq. Last week, it suffered in one day 29 bombing attacks in 19 cities, killing 111 civilian and wounding another 235. The same day, Syria's bloodbath consumed about the same number of innocents. But Iraq was "down the page" from Syria, buried "below the fold", as we journalists say; because, of course, we gave freedom to Iraq, Jeffersonian democracy, etc, etc, didn't we? So this slaughter to the east of Syria didn't have quite the same impact, did it? Nothing we did in 2003 led to Iraq's suffering today. Right?

And he reminds us that from the point of view of Western capitals, the situation in Syria is a side-show to policy on Iran:

And all the while, we forget the "big" truth. That this is an attempt to crush the Syrian dictatorship not because of our love for Syrians or our hatred of our former friend Bashar al-Assad, or because of our outrage at Russia, whose place in the pantheon of hypocrites is clear when we watch its reaction to all the little Stalingrads across Syria. No, this is all about Iran and our desire to crush the Islamic Republic and its infernal nuclear plans – if they exist – and has nothing to do with human rights or the right to life or the death of Syrian babies.

Tags: syria, robert fisk

Robert Fisk on the Kandahar massacre

Veteran Middle East war reporter Robert Fisk discusses last weekend's Kandahar massacre in Madness is not the reason for this massacre The Independent 03/18 17/2012. He's justifiably disgusted at the instant cover-up PR process that went into operation immediately on the news becoming public. The Pentagon may have made a complete godawful mess of the war in Afghanistan. But cover-their-assess PR? That they are at least efficient about:

I'm getting a bit tired of the "deranged" soldier story. It was predictable, of course. The 38-year-old staff sergeant who massacred 16 Afghan civilians, including nine children, near Kandahar this week had no sooner returned to base than the defence experts and the think-tank boys and girls announced that he was "deranged". Not an evil, wicked, mindless terrorist – which he would be, of course, if he had been an Afghan, especially a Taliban – but merely a guy who went crazy.

But as quick as our generals may be about getting misdirection and excuses out there when an incident like this occurs - and they've had a lot of practice at it these last 10 years! - they haven't been effective at keeping the Afghanistan War popular at home. They have been successful at keeping it going, working in partnership with both Democratic and Republican politicians on that. Fisk continues:

The Afghan narrative has been curiously lobotomised – censored, even – by those who have been trying to explain this appalling massacre in Kandahar. They remembered the Koran burnings – when American troops in Bagram chucked Korans on a bonfire – and the deaths of six Nato soldiers, two of them Americans, which followed. But blow me down if they didn't forget – and this applies to every single report on the latest killings – a remarkable and highly significant statement from the US army's top commander in Afghanistan, General John Allen, exactly 22 days ago. Indeed, it was so unusual a statement that I clipped the report of Allen's words from my morning paper and placed it inside my briefcase for future reference.

Allen told his men that "now is not the time for revenge for the deaths of two US soldiers killed in Thursday's riots". They should, he said, "resist whatever urge they might have to strike back" after an Afghan soldier killed the two Americans. "There will be moments like this when you're searching for the meaning of this loss," Allen continued. "There will be moments like this, when your emotions are governed by anger and a desire to strike back. Now is not the time for revenge, now is the time to look deep inside your souls, remember your mission, remember your discipline, remember who you are."

It's good that this general was trying to restrain revenge killings. But Fisk describes what this indicates, the reality behind the PR about American soldiers spending their time painting girls' schools and meeting respectfully with village elders and blah, blah:

Now this was an extraordinary plea to come from the US commander in Afghanistan. The top general had to tell his supposedly well-disciplined, elite, professional army not to "take vengeance" on the Afghans they are supposed to be helping/protecting/nurturing/training, etc. He had to tell his soldiers not to commit murder. I know that generals would say this kind of thing in Vietnam. But Afghanistan? Has it come to this? I rather fear it has. Because – however much I dislike generals – I've met quite a number of them and, by and large, they have a pretty good idea of what's going on in the ranks. And I suspect that Allen had already been warned by his junior officers that his soldiers had been enraged by the killings that followed the Koran burnings – and might decide to go on a revenge spree. Hence he tried desperately – in a statement that was as shocking as it was revealing – to pre-empt exactly the massacre which took place last Sunday. [my emphasis]

Can you imagine words like the ones I bolded coming out of the mouths of one of our star American journalists, like, say, David Gregory of Meet the Press? "However much I dislike generals – I've met quite a number of them": no, even trying to fantasize about it, it feels completely impossible for pretty-boy anchor David Gregory to utter such words. And the same is true for virtually every other star pundit on American TV.

Fisk points out that the Western press was generally eager to grab onto an explanation that wouldn't require them to talk about a breakdown of military discipline: "As usual, the journos had got into bed with the military to create a madman rather than a murderous soldier".

And he closes on a war-weary note:

We've all had our little massacres. There was My Lai, and our very own little My Lai, at a Malayan village called Batang Kali where the Scots Guards – involved in a conflict against ruthless communist insurgents – murdered 24 unarmed rubber workers in 1948. Of course, one can say that the French in Algeria were worse than the Americans in Afghanistan – one French artillery unit is said to have "disappeared" 2,000 Algerians in six months – but that is like saying that we are better than Saddam Hussein. True, but what a baseline for morality. And that's what it's about. Discipline. Morality. Courage. The courage not to kill in revenge. But when you are losing a war that you are pretending to win – I am, of course, talking about Afghanistan – I guess that's too much to hope. General Allen seems to have been wasting his time.

Tags: afghanistan war, kandahar massacre, robert fisk

Civil war developing in Yemen, US policy looking increasingly irrelevant in the Arab Awakening

The opposition claims that the Yemeni dictator Ali Abdallah Salih is allowing Al Qa'ida in Yemen to take over some areas in order to scare other countries into providing aid against the other rebels challenging the regime.



Here is another instance where we see how the constrictions of the War on Terror framework restricts and complicates the foreign policy options of the United States. Robert Fisk argues that US influence seems to be sharply declining in the wake of the Arab Awakening (Who cares in the Middle East what Obama says? The Independent 05/30/2011):

While Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu played out their farce in Washington – Obama grovelling as usual – the Arabs got on with the serious business of changing their world, demonstrating and fighting and dying for freedoms they have never possessed. Obama waffled on about change in the Middle East – and about America's new role in the region. It was pathetic. "What is this 'role' thing?" an Egyptian friend asked me at the weekend. "Do they still believe we care about what they think?"

And it is true. Obama's failure to support the Arab revolutions until they were all but over lost the US most of its surviving credit in the region. Obama was silent on the overthrow of Ben Ali, only joined in the chorus of contempt for Mubarak two days before his flight, condemned the Syrian regime – which has killed more of its people than any other dynasty in this Arab "spring", save for the frightful Gaddafi – but makes it clear that he would be happy to see Assad survive, waves his puny fist at puny Bahrain's cruelty and remains absolutely, stunningly silent over Saudi Arabia. And he goes on his knees before Israel. Is it any wonder, then, that Arabs are turning their backs on America, not out of fury or anger, nor with threats or violence, but with contempt? It is the Arabs and their fellow Muslims of the Middle East who are themselves now making the decisions. ...

Listening to Obama's 45-minute speech this month – the "kick off' to four whole days of weasel words and puffery by the man who tried to reach out to the Muslim world in Cairo two years ago, and then did nothing – one might have thought that the American President had initiated the Arab revolts, rather than sat on the sidelines in fear. [my emphasis]

One of the complications with Syria, Fisk reports, is that Turkey is worried about a flood of Kurdish refugees bolstering Kurdish anti-government sentiment in Turkey and is prepared to send Turkish troops into Syria to set up a "safe haven" for Syrian Kurdish refugees there inside Syria. And he writes of Yemen:

Amid all these vast and epic events – Yemen itself may yet prove to be the biggest bloodbath of all, while the number of Syria's "martyrs" have now exceeded the victims of Mubarak's death squads five months ago – is it any surprise that the frolics of Messrs Netanyahu and Obama appear so irrelevant?

He reminds us that people in the Arab world really do have a different viewpoint than the American conventional wisdom. Writing about Obama's recent pronouncements on Israel-Palestine:

Then we had the endless waffle about the 1967 borders. Netanyahu called them "defenceless" (though they seemed to have been pretty defendable for the 18 years prior to the Six Day War) and Obama – oblivious to the fact that Israel must be the only country in the world to have an eastern land frontier but doesn't know where it is – then says he was misunderstood when he talked about 1967. It doesn't matter what he says. George W Bush caved in years ago when he gave Ariel Sharon a letter which stated America's acceptance of "already existing major Israeli population centres" beyond the 1967 lines. To those Arabs prepared to listen to Obama's spineless oration, this was a grovel too far. They simply could not understand the reaction of Netanyahu's address to Congress. How could American politicians rise and applaud Netanyahu 55 times – 55 times – with more enthusiasm than one of the rubber parliaments of Assad, Saleh and the rest? [my emphasis]

Fisk reminds us of a bit of history, something that seems to get re-written almost daily in US conventional wisdom:

Of course, cynicism grows the longer you live in the Middle East. I recall, for example, travelling to Gaza in the early 1980s when Yasser Arafat was running his PLO statelet in Beirut. Anxious to destroy Arafat's prestige in the occupied territories, the Israeli government decided to give its support to an Islamist group in Gaza called Hamas. In fact, I actually saw with my own eyes the head of the Israeli army's Southern Command negotiating with bearded Hamas officials, giving them permission to build more mosques. It's only fair to say, of course, that we were also busy at the time, encouraging a certain Osama bin Laden to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan. But the Israelis did not give up on Hamas. They later held another meeting with the organisation in the West Bank; the story was on the front page of the Jerusalem Post the next day. But there wasn't a whimper from the Americans.

And he asks a pragmatic question about the Palestinian quest for UN recognition of statehood as it relates to the Arab Awakening:

Obama warns the Palestinians not to ask for statehood at the United Nations in September. But why on earth not? If the people of Egypt and Tunisia and Yemen and Libya and Syria – we are all waiting for the next revolution (Jordan? Bahrain again? Morocco?) – can fight for freedom and dignity, why shouldn't the Palestinians? Lectured for decades on the need for non-violent protest, the Palestinians elect to go to the UN with their cry for legitimacy – only to be slapped down by Obama.

The United States has to deal with states in international relations. There's a good case to be made that the US should recognize any government that is in practice in control of a country. The idea of formal diplomatic recognition as some kind of reward is a dubious one. It certainly doesn't seem to have proved very constructive in the case of Cuba. And while the Taliban government in Afghanistan was an odious one, it's questionable whether a policy of diplomatic isolation necessarily produced the best result. It's hard to see how a Taliban government with which the US had diplomatic relations could have produced more damaging results that it did with its collaboration with Osama bin Laden's original Al Qa'ida group.

Most Americans like the idea that we should promote democracy in the world, and so do I. But once we get below the level of that grand generalization, things get a lot stickier. The plain fact is that a lot of US democracy-promotion efforts are hard to distinguish from attempts at subversion of the government of a hostile nation-state. Supporting economic development and educational programs through genuinely independent international agencies should help move things in that direction.

But the US is a long way from a serious effort at that kind of thing. We try to promote "civil society" in countries like Iran we regard as hostile, which means in practice supporting opposition groups, including the occasional terrorist band. We claim we're supporting freedom and democracy when we enter a conflict like the Libyan civil war. But the shining democratic credentials of the opposition groups haven't yet become apparent.

We would be better off avoiding wars whenever reasonably possible, which was certainly the case with the Iraq War and the Libya War. And using conflict-resolution efforts like those the Carter Center effectively applies in many areas of the world to diffuse conflicts before they break out into civil wars. Every case is unique, of course. But there has to be some way the US can do a better job of having good relations with dictatorial regimes like those of Hosni Mubarak or Muammar Qaddafi and yet make clear our support for democratic aspirations even in those countries.

Dictatorial regimes do things that the US perceives as being in our interests. Egypt has maintained peaceful relations with Israel since 1978, generally considered a big victory for US foreign policy. Preventing wars is a good thing. Libya gave up its nuclear weapons program voluntarily. It would be foolish for the US not to reward those countries somehow when they do things we want them to do, especially on major policy issues. One of the concerns about the Libya War is that it may lead aspiring nuclear proliferaters to doubt whether it's more in their interest to give up such programs than to push them to fruition in order to be able to deter invasion by the United States.

But those rewards don't have to be so heavily tilted toward giving the dictators in question the military goodies they want so badly. And sticking to international law and basic human rights considerations is good policy. Egypt and Syria were two of the countries who cooperated with the US in the "special rendition" portion of the Cheney-Bush torture program, in which those targeted for torture were sent there to be tortured. When you cooperate with another regime in that kind of dirty business, it makes it hard to cut them loose, even when they are tottering. Because they know stuff. In the case of the torture program, the figure of speech "they know where the bodies are buried" is probably very literally true.

Tags: robert fisk, bush doctrine, yemen

Dictatorships in the Arab world

This Aljazeera English documentary, "The Arab Awakening - Absolute Power" posted 06/26/2011, is primarily an analysis of how the Arab dictatorships currently being challenge by the democratic movements there have operated. It prominently features the Independent's Robert Fisk, who is very knowledgeable on that topic and is very familiar with the politics of the Arab world.



Fisk wrote recently in the Independent on this topic in Why no outcry over these torturing tyrants? 05/14/2011. The tyrants in question int hat piece being the rulers of Bahrain.

Tags: arab awakening, robert fisk

Robert Fisk on Bin Laden's death

Robert Fisk has been talking and writing about Osama bin Laden after his death. Fisk is one of the few Western journalists who has interviewed Bin Laden in person.





Some recent articles of Fisk's from The Independent:

My deadliest moment with the world's most dangerous men 05/03/2011

A close encounter with the man who shook the world 05/03/2011

Was he betrayed? Of course. Pakistan knew Bin Laden's hiding place all along 05/03/2011

The al-Qa'ida leader knew he was a failure. Now US has turned him into martyr 05/05/2011

Tags: osama bin laden, robert fisk

Upheaval in Egypt

Egyptian protest leaflet: "The police and the people against repression"

Robert Fisk, a reporter who actually knows a lot about Egypt and the rest of the Middle East reports on the current unrest and pro-democracy protests there in Egypt's day of reckoning The Independent 01/28/2011:

The barren, horrible truth, however, is that save for its brutal police force and its ominously docile army – which, by the way, does not look favourably upon Mubarak's son Gamal – the government is powerless. This is revolution by Twitter and revolution by Facebook, and technology long ago took away the dismal rules of censorship.

Mubarak's men seem to have lost all sense of initiative. Their party newspapers are filled with self-delusion, pushing the massive demonstrations to the foot of front pages as if this will keep the crowds from the streets – as if, indeed, by belittling the story, the demonstrations never happened.

But you don't need to read the papers to see what has gone wrong. The filth and the slums, the open sewers and the corruption of every government official, the bulging prisons, the laughable elections, the whole vast, sclerotic edifice of power has at last brought Egyptians on to their streets.

In general, Fisk is not sanguine about democracy coming to the Arab world any time soon, as he explains in The brutal truth about Tunisia The Independent 01/17/2011.

Helena Cobban in Obama's know-nothings discuss Egypt Just World News 01/28/2011 makes an important point: the US government is short of expertise on the Arab world. Commenting on a news photo of President Obama conferring with his advisers on Egypt, she writes:

What is notable is the absence of anyone in the group who has any serious knowledge about either Egypt or the broader region. ...

So now, in the Oval Office, we have the blind leading the blind and the blind advising the blind. No Chas Freeman, no Bill Quandt, no Rob Malley... (The list of those excluded on ideological grounds is pretty long, too.) No-one, in short, who can integrate into the advice the President desperately needs to hear any real understanding of how the peoples of the region think and how the regional system actually works. God save us all from their self-inflicted ignorance.

Von Gil Yaron reports on Israel's concern at the possible fall of Egyptian President Mubarak in Reaktion auf Unruhen: Israel hält Ägyptens Diktator die Treue Spiegel Online 27.01/2011. (English version of 28.01.2011: Concerns about the Muslim Brotherhood: Israel Fears Regime Change in Egypt) Israel has had peaceful relations with Egypt since the Sadat-Begin agreements of 1979. A more democratic regime in Egypt would almost certainly be more anti-Israel. Especially one headed by the Islamist group, the Muslim Brotherhood.

Tags: egypt, robert fisk

Afghanistan War, then and now

Robert Fisk has seen it before, and he asks Kabul 30 years ago, and Kabul today. Have we learned nothing? Independent 11/22/08

Thirty miles north, all those years ago, a Soviet general told us of the imminent victory over the "terrorists" in the mountains, imperialist "remnants" – the phrase Kabul communist radio always used – who were being supported by America and Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

Fast forward to 2001 – just seven years ago – and an American general told us of the imminent victory over the "terrorists" in the mountains, the all but conquered Taliban who were being supported by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The Russian was pontificating at the big Soviet airbase at Bagram. The American general was pontificating at the big US airbase at Bagram.

This is not déjà-vu. This is déjà double-vu. And it gets worse.

Fisk doesn't think things look very good for the US and NATO in Afghanistan. Or that adding another 20,000 Western troops is going to change that situation, except perhaps for making the costs to the US and NATO even greater.

Tags: afghanistan war, robert fisk

Grim reckoning

Robert Fisk wrote last week in The Independent on the topic of how Obama has to pay for eight years of Bush's delusions 11/08/08.

Fisk, who not only knows a lot about Middle Eastern politics and wars but also has a practical sense of history, especially for that region in its relations to the US and Europe, writes:

Obama has got to close Guantanamo. He's got to find a way of apologising to the world for the crimes of his predecessor, not an easy task for a man who must show pride in his country; but saying sorry is what – internationally – he will have to do if the "change" he has been promoting at home is to have any meaning outside America's borders. He will have to re-think – and deconstruct – the whole "war on terror". He will have to get out of Iraq. He will have to call a halt to America's massive airbases in Iraq, its $600m embassy. He will have to end the blood-caked air strikes we are perpetrating in southern Afghanistan – why, oh, why do we keep slaughtering wedding parties? – and he will have to tell Israel a few home truths: that America can no longer remain uncritical in the face of Israeli army brutality and the colonisation for Jews and Jews only on Arab land. Obama will have to stand up at last to the Israeli lobby (it is, in fact, an Israeli Likud party lobby) and withdraw Bush's 2004 acceptance of Israel's claim to a significant portion of the West Bank. US officials will have to talk to Iranian officials – and Hamas officials, for that matter. Obama will have to end US strikes into Pakistan – and Syria. [my emphasis]

But this is something that I had not heard before, although I knew that there was serious discipline problems in the US forces in Iraq. Coming from Fisk, I take it seriously:

Indeed, there's a growing concern among America's allies in the Middle East that the US military has to be brought back under control – indeed, that the real reason for General David Petraeus' original appointment in Iraq was less to organise the "surge" than it was to bring discipline back to the 150,000 soldiers and marines whose mission – and morals – had become so warped by Bush's policies. There is some evidence, for example, that the four-helicopter strike into Syria last month, which killed eight people, was – if not a rogue operation – certainly not sanctioned by Washington or indeed by US commanders in Baghdad. [my emphasis]

A military act of aggression against a country with which we are not at war may have been a rogue operation?

This is one of the scarier things I've heard in a while.

It's probably time - actually, long past time - for Americans to get used to the German principle that there is no such thing as collective guilt, but there is collective responsibility. Fisk frames the torture policy and the Bush Gulag in a way that reminds us just how serious the damage done to our country by Dick Cheney and George Bush has been:

There is just one little problem, though, and that's the "missing" prisoners. Not the victims who have been (still are being?) tortured in Guantanamo, but the thousands who have simply disappeared into US custody abroad or – with American help – into the prisons of US allies. Some reports speak of 20,000 missing men, most of them Arabs, all of them Muslims. Where are they? Can they be freed now? Or are they dead? If Obama finds that he is inheriting mass graves from George W Bush, there will be a lot of apologising to do.

And if some of the more serious crimes connected with the torture policy, the Bush Gulag and Iraq War are not actually prosecuted and the perpetrators held legally responsible, it's very likely that the rule of law will be seriously impaired on a long-term basis.

The Democrats are wringing their hands over whether to boot Joe Lieberman out of his Chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, an action which should be a no-brainer. While they have a far more serious and difficult task of restoring the rule of law after the Cheney-Bush administration.

The crimes committed during this outgoing administration - and not just those involved with foreign policy - have long-term consequences. If the incoming Obama administration and the Democratic-controlled Congress don't treat them for what they are - crimes, and serious ones - America's reputation among both allies and adversaries as a rogue superpower will endure for a very long time.

This is not just a matter of some vague moral sense of "dealing with the past." There are many aspiring Dick Cheneys out there who would like to resume the Cheney brand of government, and take it to the next level. And I don't even like to think what that next level would look like. If the criminal acts of the current administration aren't dealt with as criminal acts, it's very likely that some the aspiring Cheneys will succeed in their goal.

Tags: authoritarianism, dick cheney, robert fisk, torture, war crimes

What the great progress of The Surge (aka, the McCain esclation) looks like

Despite Maverick McCain's unbounded faith in his Surge plan and the claims of brilliant success from our Savior-General Petraeus, the Iraq War goes on. Juan Cole comments on the horrific double-suicide bombings on Friday in Baghdad (91 Dead in 2 Baghdad Blasts Informed Comment blog 02/02/08):

Two women set off separate suicide bombs in two markets in Baghdad on Friday, killing at least 91 persons and wounding a similar number. Contrary to what this AP squib implies, the bombings suggest neither that "al-Qaeda" is running out of men nor that it is desperate. Women were used because they would be less likely to be closely searched, in a society where gender segregation and female honor and chastity are important values. The story that the women had Downs syndrome seems unlikely to be true; you wouldn't trust a sensitive terror plot to someone without their full faculties. Rather, the bombings show that the Sunni Arab guerrillas seeking to destabilize Iraq have not been defeated and are still capable of making a big strike right under the noses of the surge troops. And that is how guerrilla war is-- large conventional forces find it difficult to curb it.

McClatchy News (formerly Knight-Ridder) is still doing a good job on reporting on the war as they have since the buildup to the invasion, making them nearly unique among major American journalistic enterprises: Iraqi insurgents find female bombers can skirt security by Leila Fadel and Hussein Kadhim 02/01/08. Fadel and Kadhim note in their report, "As is frequently the case in accounts of violence, U.S. officials offered a death toll that was only half that of Iraqi authorities'."

See also Women suicide bombers kill 72 in attacks on Baghdad markets by Patrick Cockburn The Independent 01/02/08. Cockburn is still doing reporting from Iraq despite the not-inconsiderable dangers. He also speaks Arabic, which many of the US reporters who have done Iraq War reporting do not. He writes:

Al-Qa'ida has mounted a series of attacks in the past week, mostly targeting leaders of the Sunni tribal militia, al-Sahwah, which opposes al-Qa'ida. The bombing of Ghazil, in a predominantly Shia part of the city, will also have been aimed at provoking Shia retaliation against Sunni Muslims, who might then look again to al-Qa'ida for protection. ...

Al-Qa'ida has increasingly been using women as suicide bombers because they are never searched by male police officers men or soldiers, and there is a shortage of women to do the job in Iraq's overwhelmingly male security forces.

The atrocities show that al-Qa'ida is still a powerful force with many recruits willing to kill themselves, and is backed by an organisation with intelligence, explosives and the means to detonate them. In recent weeks, it has been targeting al-Sahwah leaders and has often succeeded in penetrating their security. Last week, a car bomb exploded next to the house of Abu Marouf, an al-Sahwah leader commanding 13,000 men, in the village of Khan Dari, between Baghdad and Fallujah.

When I met him four days earlier, he was surrounded by guards and chose which of his many vehicles to travel in at the last moment to prevent assassination. Even so, al-Qa'ida was able to get a bomb close to his home and wounded four of his guards.

Despite improving security, Baghdad was a very fearful city even before yesterday's attacks and will now be more so.

Hasn't Cockburn heard from Savior-General Petraeus and Maverick McCain that things are going great in Iraq?


And, whatever the mix of motivations that produced the 2003 invasion, oil revenues are very much part of what is at stake in Iraq. The Information Clearing House in reports on a 01/31/08 item in on Akhbar Alkhaleej newspaper (Iraqi sister paper to Bahrain's Gulf Daily News):

An Iraqi MP preferred to remain anonymous told the newspaper that highly confidential negotiations took place by representatives from American oil companies, offering $5 million to each MP who votes in favor of the Oil and Gas law.

Juan Cole also corrects the record that Hillary Clinton misstated about the 1998 end of weapons inspections in Iraq which was used as the justification of the Operation Desert Fox bombing in 1998. (Probably not the most inspired name for an American military operation in light of the fact that the Second World War German Gen. Ernst Rommel was famously known as the "Desert Fox".) Our crack "press corps" manages to pretty much ignore the periodic bombing that the US conducted against Iraq throughout the 1990s, of which Operation Desert Fox was the most significant. Cole writes (Iraq and Iran in the Democratic Debate 02/01/08):

It is worth noting that Clinton misstated the 1998 events. The US did not bomb Iraq because Saddam "kicked out" the UN weapons inspectors. The US decided to bomb Iraq for other reasons and therefore ordered the inspectors out of the country. The myth that Saddam "kicked out" the inspectors just won't die.

For more of the details, see the links above and also Fairness and Accuracy in Media (FAIR): Common Myths in Iraq Coverage 11/27/02; USA Today Repeats Myths on Iraq Inspectors 08/12/02.

Additional Iraq War news and commentary:

Bomb takes death toll of journalists in Iraq war to 126 by Patrick Cockburn The Independent 01/31/08.

Torture does not work, as history shows by Robert Fisk The Independent 02/01/08:

"Torture works," an American special forces major – now, needless to say, a colonel – boasted to a colleague of mine a couple of years ago. It seems that the CIA and its hired thugs in Afghanistan and Iraq still believe this. There is no evidence that rendition and beatings and waterboarding and the insertion of metal pipes into men's anuses – and, of course, the occasional torturing to death of detainees – has ended. Why else would the CIA admit in January that it had destroyed videotapes of prisoners being almost drowned – the "waterboarding" technique – before they could be seen by US investigators?

Yet only a few days ago, I came across a medieval print in which a prisoner has been strapped to a wooden chair, a leather hosepipe pushed down his throat and a primitive pump fitted at the top of the hose where an ill-clad torturer is hard at work squirting water down the hose. The prisoner's eyes bulge with terror as he feels himself drowning, all the while watched by Spanish inquisitors who betray not the slightest feelings of sympathy with the prisoner. Who said "waterboarding" was new? The Americans are just apeing their predecessors in the inquisition. ...

Torture does not obtain truth. It will make most ordinary people say anything the torturer wants. Why, who knows if the men under the CIA's "waterboarding" did not confess that they could fly to meet the devil. And who knows if the CIA did not end up believing him. (my emphasis)

Tags: iraq war, juan cole, operation desert fox, patrick cockburn, robert fisk, torture

Benazir Bhutto before she became a martyr to democracy

Leave it to Robert Fisk (relying on reporing by Tariq Ali in this case) to provide a well-informed take on Benazir Bhutto's assassination that frames things in a surprising way, in They don't blame al-Qa'ida. They blame Musharraf Independent 12/29/07. Commenting on the "childish" coverage of her death, he asks:

Who would have imagined, watching the BBC or CNN on Thursday, that her two brothers, Murtaza and Shahnawaz, hijacked a Pakistani airliner in 1981 and flew it to Kabul where Murtaza demanded the release of political prisoners in Pakistan. Here, a military officer on the plane was murdered. There were Americans aboard the flight – which is probably why the prisoners were indeed released.

Well, it was news to me anyway. And that's not all. Referring to a 2007 article by Tariq Ali on Pakistan, Daughter of the West London Review of Books 12/13/07, he writes:

Towards the end of this report, Tariq Ali dwelt at length on the subsequent murder of Murtaza Bhutto by police close to his home at a time when Benazir was prime minister – and at a time when Benazir was enraged at Murtaza for demanding a return to PPP values and for condemning Benazir's appointment of her own husband as minister for industry, a highly lucrative post.

In a passage which may yet be applied to the aftermath of Benazir's murder, the report continues: "The fatal bullet had been fired at close range. The trap had been carefully laid, but, as is the way in Pakistan, the crudeness of the operation – false entries in police log-books, lost evidence, witnesses arrested and intimidated – a policeman killed who they feared might talk – made it obvious that the decision to execute the prime minister's brother had been taken at a very high level."

When Murtaza's 14-year-old daughter, Fatima, rang her aunt Benazir to ask why witnesses were being arrested – rather than her father's killers – she says Benazir told her: "Look, you're very young. You don't understand things."

Yo!

Tags: benazir bhutto, pakistan, robert fisk, tariq ali

More on the Armenian genocide

I mentioned in the previous post that Robert Fisk deals with the Armenian genocide in his book, The Great War for Civilisation (2005). I see that he has a new column on the subject, A reign of terror which history has chosen to neglect Independent 10/12/07. He writes:

The story of the last century's first Holocaust – Winston Churchill used this very word about the Armenian genocide years before the Nazi murder of six million Jews – is well known, despite the refusal of modern-day Turkey to acknowledge the facts. Nor are the parallels with Nazi Germany's persecution of the Jews idle ones.

For what it's worth, partisans of the present-day official Turkish position on this question claim that British propagandists grossly inflated the significance and scope of Ottoman Turks' attacks on Armenians.

Fisk cites an extant order by Ottoman Sultan Enver Pasha on the intentions of the anti-Armenian actions:

On 15 September 1915, for example (and a carbon of this document exists), Talaat Pasha, the Turkish Interior minister, cabled an instruction to his prefect in Aleppo about what he should do with the tens of thousands of Armenians in his city. "You have already been informed that the government... has decided to destroy completely all the indicated persons living in Turkey... Their existence must be terminated, however tragic the measures taken may be, and no regard must be paid to either age or sex, or to any scruples of conscience."

Fisk notes that "the Armenians, descended from the residents of ancient Urartu, became the first Christian nation when their king Drtad converted from paganism in AD301."

Another Fisk article available online about the Armenian genocide is Let me denounce genocide from the dock Independent 10/14/06.

Left Out in Turkey by Christopher de Bellaigue New York Review of Books 07/14/07 (behind subscription) discusses among other things how Turkey's official position on the Armenian genocide functioned as one obstacle to their membership in the European Union:

Many Armenians agree that Turkey must recognize the events of 1915 as genocide. Turkish officials vigorously resist a label that, they rightly fear, will result in their being associated with horrors comparable to the Holocaust and may expose them to class-action lawsuits. It is hard to argue that the writing and understanding of history have benefited from the bitter controversy over the word "genocide." Many individual Turks accept that the Ottomans committed an appalling crime, but the same Turks violently react against suggestions that the crime was genocide.[7] The attitude of these Turks, in turn, enrages many Armenians, for some of whom it is the label of genocide that counts—more so than an appropriate show of contrition or even an honest appraisal of the past.[8] So a distorted "debate" is taking place in the shadow of Turkey's bid for EU membership.

Israeli "new historian" Michael Oren reviews the book, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility by Taner Akçam, in The Mass Murder They Still Deny New York Review of Books 05/10/07 (behind subscription). Oren notes that 1915 was not the first times that the Ottoman rulers had turned on the Armenians with deadly fury:

Between 1894 and 1896, Turkish troops rampaged through Armenian villages, ransacking an estimated one million houses and killing as many 200,000. "All the Armenians in sight were killed and their houses and stores robbed," one American diplomat wrote. "Another Armenian Holocaust!" exclaimed a New York Times headline in what may have been the first use of the word to denote genocide.

The outlines of what happened in 1915 were not a secret to the outside world, though in wartime everyone is (or should be!) cautious about the tales that "the fog of war" can produce. Oren writes:

America's representative in Aleppo, Syria, Jesse B. Jackson, observed railway cars crammed with starving Armenian deportees, few of whom, if any, he expected to survive. From the Persian frontier, the Presbyterian missionary William Shedd wrote about the execution of eight hundred villagers, mostly old people and young women, and from the Caucasus, Reverend Richard Hill reported seeing "children...dying by the hundreds" whose "frenzied mothers would...fling them...into the fields, so as not to see the[ir] dying agonies." Other correspondents saw the inhabitants of entire towns driven into rivers to drown or herded into churches that were then set ablaze.

These grisly descriptions reached not only Allied embassies but also the general public, through extensive press coverage of the carnage. In May 1915 the Allied Powers issued a declaration protesting these "crimes against humanity" and vowing to hold Turkey's leaders "personally responsible." A similar process occurred in the United States, though it was still maintaining its neutrality in the war. In response, the nation's leading philanthropists and clergymen, Christians and Jews, joined in creating the Committee on the Armenian Atrocities, which raised a monumental $100 million for Near East relief.

The fate of the Armenians also figured prominently in the debates surrounding America's entry into the conflict against Germany and Austria-Hungary in April 1917. A large majority of both Houses of Congress demanded a declaration of war against Turkey as well, in order to rescue the Armenians. "The Armenian massacre was the greatest crime of the war," former president Theodore Roosevelt said, "and failure to act against Turkey is to condone it."

While Roosevelt may well have been right in his judgment on that particular point, its worth remembering in all of his contemporaneous comments on the Great War that he had become rabidly anti-German and more jingoistic than he had ever been before.

Oren reports on the outcome of the anti-Armenian operation:

Allied forces eventually defeated the Turks and occupied large segments of Anatolia but never sought justice for those guilty of "crimes against humanity." As many as 1.5 million Armenians had been murdered, but outside of the surviving Armenian community, their memory swiftly faded.

Oren describes how, over the course of the 19th century, pressure on the Ottoman Empire from Christian powers led to increased hostility toward the Armenian Christians. There was clearly a religious aspect to this. He describes the implementation of the process during the Great War:

Most of the slaughter was organized by officials of the national regime, provincial governors, and the gendarmes. Akçam is at his best in reconstructing the process through which the decisions were made, usually in secret without the knowledge of the cabinet or the parliament. Orders were given to bring the Armenian problem, in Interior Minister Talat's phrase, to "a final end, in a comprehensive and absolute way." Akçam proves baseless the Turkish claims that the Armenian casualties were incurred during an Armenian uprising in the city of Van in eastern Turkey or in the process of relocating pro-Russian Armenians who lived near the front lines in World War I. Some 55,000 Armenians were massacred in Van before the rebellion while most of the Armenians deported lived nowhere near the battlefields. On the other hand, Akçam cites instances in which ordinary Turks, even religious officials, risked their lives to save Armenians. His book is dedicated to one of them, Haji Halil, who hid an Armenian family of eight.

Haji Halil, however, was an exception. All but a few Muslims remained silent throughout the atrocities and some participated in them. In his memoirs, Lewis Einstein, yet another American Jewish diplomat assigned to the Istanbul embassy, tells of watching as an elderly Muslim woman borrowed an officer's pistol and shot a passing Armenian refugee in the head. Unencumbered by domestic opposition or objections from Turkey's German and Austrian allies, Turkish slaughter of the Armenians persisted until the Treaty of Mudros, signed on October 30, 1918, ended the war in the east.

Oren describes how power politics among the Allies carving up the Middle East after the First World War stymied any action on the Armenian genocide. He continues:

The final and ultimately insurmountable hurdle, however, arose in May 1919 with the Greek invasion of Smyrna, which resulted in the mass killing and deportation of innumerable Muslims from the area. Armenians demanded independence in six Anatolian provinces. These events rallied nationalist forces under the charismatic command of General Mustapha Kemal. Influenced by his Unionist past and eager to reunite the Turks after years of defeat and fractiousness, Kemal - who later adopted the name Atatürk, "Father Turk" - all but suppressed any further mention of genocide. The massacres, he claimed, were the work of a small and unauthorized clique—a "shameful act," but one for which the Turkish nation bore no collective responsibility.

The Kemalist armies proved victorious, driving out the Greeks and forcing the Allies to sue for a treaty. At the Lausanne Conference in 1923, which established Turkey's permanent borders, the Armenian massacres were not even mentioned; nor were the Armenians allowed to take part (while the claims of the Kurds were disregarded). The question of the Armenian genocide would remain in abeyance for more than eighty years, by which time its denial had become a part of Turkish law and identity. The last of the Armenian witnesses to the crime reached the age of one hundred, and the memories of emaciated children, destroyed villages, and mass graves faded.

Congress' timing in considering a symbolic resolution on the Armenian genocide right now is certainly open to question.

But the event itself certainly is a very important one in the history of the Middle East and the world. Thanks to Dick Cheney's war in Iraq, we're part of the neighborhood now in a way we never have been before.

Tags: armenian genocide, michael oren, robert fisk

Robert Fisk on the idea of Tony Blair as special envoy for the Middle East

British journalist Robert Fisk gives his caustic view of President Bush's suggestion that outgoing British premier Tony Blair be appointed the Quartet envoy to work on an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement: How can Blair possibly be given this job? Independent 06/23/07. Fisk consistently refers to Blair sarcastically as "Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara", referring to a city in eastern Iraq where British forces were defeated and 10,000 British soldiers compelled to surrender to the Ottoman army during the First World War. Blair hasn't actually been knighted yet, though it's customary for former prime ministers to receive knighthood soon after they leave office, so he probably will be knighted in the near future.

I suppose that astonishment is not the word for it. Stupefaction comes to mind. I simply could not believe my ears in Beirut when a phone call told me that Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara was going to create "Palestine". I checked the date - no, it was not 1 April - but I remain overwhelmed that this vain, deceitful man, this proven liar, a trumped-up lawyer who has the blood of thousands of Arab men, women and children on his hands is really contemplating being "our" Middle East envoy.

Can this really be true? I had always assumed that Balfour, Sykes and Picot were the epitome of Middle Eastern hubris. But Blair? That this ex-prime minister, this man who took his country into the sands of Iraq, should actually believe that he has a role in the region - he whose own preposterous envoy, Lord Levy, made so many secret trips there to absolutely no avail - is now going to sully his hands (and, I fear, our lives) in the world's last colonial war is simply overwhelming.

By "the world's last colonial war", Fisk means the Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and the conflict over them now entering its fifth decade.

The Independent also has an article on three Catholics on Blair's Downing Street staff who left their posts because of their religious objections to the Iraq War: PM's Iraq war 'helped drive Catholics out of Downing Street' by Andrew Grice and Andy McSmith 06/23/07.

Tags: robert fisk, tony blair

Factional fighting in Gaza and the road to Middle East peace

The title of this El País editorial, Gaza, fuera de control (Gaza out of control) 13.06.07. The Los Angeles Times reports on the latest fighting there: Palestinian infighting worsens in Gaza by Rushdi abu Alouf and Richard Boudreaux 06/12/07. Donald Macintyre reports for The Independent, Hamas seizes Fatah base as bloody battles push Gaza towards civil war 06/13/07.

This is where things stand, 40 years after the Six Day War that left Israel in "control" of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. If we measure the results of that war by the long-term outcome, how much did Israel actually win?

Robert Fisk, also writing for The Independent, recalls in Lies and outrages... would you believe it? 06/09/07 that the French press and public opinion in 1967 were strongly sympathetic to Israel around the Six Day War. So much so that Charles De Gaulle was unusual in a perceptive observation he made, possibly reflecting his own experiences with Algeria:

Only the president of France, General de Gaulle, moved into political isolation by telling a press conference several months later that Israel "is organising, on the territories which it has taken, an occupation which cannot work without oppression, repression and expulsions - and if there appears resistance to this, it will in turn be called 'terrorism'". This accurate prophecy earned reproof from the Nouvel Observateur - to the effect that "Gaullist France has no friends; it has only interests". And Believe It or Not, with the exception of one small Christian paper, there was in the entire French press one missing word: Palestinians.

The American Prospect's June 2007 issue is a special issue on the Middle East. It includes several articles on the Israel-Palestine conflict and possibilities for a real peace agreement, including (articles in the current issue may be behind subscription but soon become generally available):

And the Land Was Troubled for 40 Years by Gershom Gorenberg 05/29/07 (available generally):

Politics was transformed. In 1967, "The agenda changed from building a nation to maintaining an empire," says Shlomo Swirski, academic director of the Adva Center, a Tel Aviv social-policy institute. Before the war, Swirski says, government goals included providing jobs and housing for the Jewish refugees who had flooded Israel in its early years. Those projects had not been completed, but they were pushed aside. "Right" and "left" had previously referred to positions on economics; now they stood for views on settlement, Palestinians, and whether to keep all of the land or give up some for peace.

To this day, every other issue has been postponed -- indefinitely, eternally. Schools deteriorate; national health care covers steadily less; tax cuts for the wealthy barely merit debate. In its first years, Israel was a social democracy; now it is ruled by Friedmanism. Yet a party that campaigns on economics declares itself marginal. What matters is territory and security. In the meantime, social gangrene sets in.

Before 1967, nation building also meant turning a movement into a state, establishing the rule of law and civil liberties. The occupation reversed that process. From the start of the settlement effort, the cause has trumped the law. In the summer of 1967, Allon funneled government funds for the unemployed to the first settlers in the Golan Heights. Aid from officials to lawbreakers has continued ever since.

American Jews and the Mideast by Jo-Ann Mort 05/20/07 (currently behind subscription):

The fact is that 40 years after the 1967 War, which did threaten Israel's survival, Israel's survival is threatened once again. The current threat doesn't come from Hamas terrorism or even Iran; it comes from Israel's failure to extricate itself from the occupied territories in a manner that will ensure its security and future as a Jewish and democratic state - a threat that surely harms U.S. interests in the region as well.

Past Failures, Future Possibilities by Shlomo Ben-Ami 05/20/07 (currently behind subscription):

The solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lies in an outline that is embodied in the main peace plans on the table: the Clinton peace parameters and the all-Arab peace initiative of 2002, recently reconfirmed by the Arab League in its Riyadh summit March 28–29. The inadequacy of a strictly bilateral approach was well understood by the initiators of the all-Arab peace initiative. That initiative is, most importantly, a call to regionalize the solution to the conflict after the bilateral approach ended in failure. The loss of mutual trust between the parties and their total incapacity to take even the smallest step toward each other, let alone to observe their commitments without being nursed by third parties, make the creation of an international framework for peace the last and only way out of this dangerous impasse.

Ten Commandments for Mideast Peace by Daniel Levy, Ghaith al-Omari and Robert Malley 05/20/07 (currently behind subscription):

It is in the nature of Israel's democracy to be vibrant, unpredictable, and utterly unmanageable. That is sometimes good (as when an independent commission holds the government accountable for its mismanagement of the Lebanon war), and sometimes less so (as when all government action is seemingly halted as an entire nation awaits the cabinet's fate). The United States cannot afford to shape its actions on the basis of the latest poll or coalition maneuver. Instead, and without being oblivious to political realities, Washington should remind itself that a credible peace plan enjoying strong American backing can count on majority Israeli public support. This, rather than the latest round of cabinet musical chairs, is what should guide U.S. policy-makers. ...

There often will be temptation to play Palestinian politics, especially when parts of the leadership appear nonresponsive to U.S. pressures or, worse, hostile to U.S. interests. And there rarely will be a shortage of Palestinian leaders offering themselves up as potential allies in the hope that ties to the United States will strengthen their hand in the domestic competition. Yet every time the United States has sought to meddle, the meddling has backfired, with results ranging from the ineffective to the outright counterproductive. Lack of understanding is part of the reason, but part only. Added to that is the reality that America's embrace can do more harm than good to those it seeks to benefit. Attempts to isolate and bypass Arafat, to mention but one glaring example, not only failed to reduce his standing; they also contributed to Fatah's fragmentation and to the loss of U.S. credibility and leverage. (my emphasis)

Europe and the Middle East by Chris Patten 05/20/07 (currently behind subscription):

Present policies lead nowhere except to more deaths and to the destruction of more hope. Should Europe continue to think its role is to whistle past the graveyard, hoping for better news while secretly fearing the worst? It may not be popular to say it, but while the road to a peace in Jerusalem did not lead through Baghdad, the road to a more peaceful Middle East certainly demands -- early in the journey, at least -- a peaceful settlement between Palestine and Israel.

I want to see a prosperous and democratic Israel, reflecting values that most of us share on either side of the Atlantic, living at peace with its neighbors -- the sort of peace that the Geneva Initiative would have brought. That is not an anti-Israeli statement, or a pro-Arab one. It is a pro-peace argument, with an outcome that the United States and Europe should recognize is hugely in their own interest.

What, after all, is the alternative?

Also, there is this recent Web-only piece on the subject:

The Year that Never Ended by Jo-Ann Mort 06/13/07, a review of Tom Segev's 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East, just published in English:

Historians disagree about the final moments leading up to the war -- could the superpowers have halted it? Was Egypt really going to strike? Did its closure of the Straits of Tiran foretell more to come? And what about Syria and Jordan? Segev's point -- a critical one, I think -- is that no matter what the situation actually was inside Egypt, Israelis felt certain that they were on the brink of extinction. "War with Egypt was inevitable," he claims. "There is no doubt that the Israelis expected a second Holocaust. I collected 500 letters, mothers to daughters and more, [saying as much.] Rabbis in Tel Aviv were sanctifying football fields because they thought they might have to bury hundreds of bodies. Egyptians don't have a national archives, so we don't know what they really wanted." There are the memoirs written by Egyptian generals, Segev notes, but then adds, "I don't trust Israeli generals, so why should I trust Egyptian generals?". At any rate, what Egyptions really intended is "not the point. It's what Israel thought."

Tags: israel, palestinians, robert fisk

Things that make you go, "Huh?"

Some days the news is exceptionally weird. Today, we've got the neoconservative theologian Michael Novak saying that Joseph Ratzinger, aka, Pope Benedict XVI, is a leftwinger. Ratzinger a leftwinger. We're into Bizarro World with that one. (See Benedict vs. the War Party by Justin Raimondo, Antiwar.com 04/11/07, and, no, I'm still not comfortable with the way Raimondo uses "War Party".)

Then we have a Page 1 story by Robert Fisk, Divide and rule - America's plan for Baghdad Independent 04/11/07, reporting that the Pentagon has a spiffy new plan for the new strategy (The Surge, aka, the McCain escalation). They're going to wall off several section of Baghdad and not let anyone in without proper ID. Hey, building that wall in the West Bank has brought permanent peace between Israel and the Palestinians, hasn't it? It's bound to work in Baghdad. And, as a special bonus benefit of this grand idea, that will free up 40,000 troops to be stationed near the Iranian border to be positioned "in the event of a US or Israeli military strike against its nuclear facilities later this year". Well, all rightie, then! Victory is just around the corner, no doubt.

Wierdest of all, Peter Baker and Tom Ricks report that three four-star generals have turned down a position that apparently still exists only somewhere in a dark recess of Dick Cheney's brain, "a high-powered czar to oversee the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with authority to issue directions to the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies" (3 Generals Spurn the Position of War 'Czar' Washington Post 04/11/07)). Presumably this new General Czar of War would only be directing the State Department on matters related to those two wars. But who knows? There are several possible ways to understand this story. If I were to use a political-science version of Occam's Razor - the least malign explaination that accounts for the known facts is probably the best - I would guess that this would be a position formally reporting to the President but really to Dick Cheney, and which would let Cheney basically run all of Middle East policy directly.

What in the name of Pallas Athena are these people thinking?

Update: Not surprisingly, a number of bloggers have been commenting on this War Czar report. Josh Marshall at TPM 04/11/07 compares it to a previous Onion spoof, illustrating once again how hard it is to actually make satire about an administration as off the tracks of this one. He takes it as a sign that Bush is feeling overwhelmed, and says it shows "why the Republic is genuinely in peril as long as this pitiful goof remains in office".

Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly sees it as an attempt to fix problems by juggling boxes on an org chart, though he also says, "the fact that Bush apparently thinks that a bit of org chart shuffling will make a significant difference in Iraq is just one more sign of how deeply out of touch with reality he is." (Out of Gas 04/11/07)

Tim Grieve at Salon's War Room focuses on the Post's quote from Gen. Jack Sheehan, one of those who turned down the job emphasizing Cheney's stranglehold over foreign policy. Grieve quips about the War Czar position, "The catch? Dick Cheney already has the job, and he's not letting go." (Cheney in charge 04/11/07)

Steve Soto at The Left Coaster writes, "Yet as the story indicates, a czar won’t do any good if the fundamental policy is wrong and is being pushed by a delusional VP with too much power." (Bush Has No Takers For "War Czar" 04/10/07).

Robert Farley at TAPPED thinks it's another sign of Republican incompetence at government and asks, "Right; we don't have one guy, we just have several guys, including the commander of CENTCOM and the Secretary of Defense, who should have this kind of authority" to coordinate the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars.

Matt Iglesias comments on the fact that nobody will so far take the job, "The Bush family's one-way understanding of loyalty also has to make this a relatively unappealing post."

The Armchair Generalist says (Failure of Leadership 04/11/07):

What the hell is wrong with these people? Maybe I'm naive, but I thought there was a guy in charge of coordinating the execution of national strategy in the region. He's called a National Security Advisor, but then again, if Condi set the bar, maybe that's not working. And of course, there's always the SecDef, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the CENTCOM combatant commander who have responsibilities there. I think all those retired generals understand that implicitly and really don't want the headache of playing butt-boy between the White House, State, DOD, and CENTCOM. As the article suggests, the obstacle here is more that there is already a civilian micromanaging the details of the wars - that would be Vice President Dick Cheney.

The most substantial blog comment on this I've seen is from Marcy (emptywheel) at The Next Hurrah (A Failure of Management 04/11/07):

We taxpayers pay a National Security Advisor to make sure that someone mediates the opinions and agendas of the many strong-willed people running our foreign policy. We pay that person to make sure that our foreign policy is managed well. But once again, the person in the position is not up to the task.

At some point, we need to face the overriding management issue. Is the problem that Condi and Hadley are incompetent (yes, partly)? But this constant shuffling, this search to find someone who can put unity to our foreign policy approach, suggests another problem. It's not just that Condi and Hadley are incompetent. It's that Bush himself can't see the issue with the requisite clarity to empower his National Security Advisor to do the job well.

Marcy is right in seeing this, as she explains in her post, as a continuation of management flubs on both wars.

But management flubs are a given in this administration, especially on the most critical foreign policy issues. I'm concerned that there's more to this, and that it's disturbing beyond the desperation and confusion it seems to show.

Marcy and the Armchair Generalist both remind us that the National Security Adviser, currently Stephen Hadley, is supposed to provide management and information coordination for overall foreign policy. But the NSA is a statutory position, and it was set up for good reasons as a formal position.

This War Czar as described in the Post article sounds like an Executive Branch creation that could be given the authority, or in practice exercise the authority, to overrule both the Secretaries of Defense and State on matters relating to the two wars.

But I'm wondering what the statutory position of a position like that would be. And since Dick Cheney apparently never does anything without thinking how it might provide an excuse to keep even more of the public's business secret from the public, Congress should start asking questions sooner rather than later. Is this a way to make an end-run around legal restraints of some kind?

One possibility relates to the covert operations that Rummy had started running out of the Pentagon. That gave him and Cheney the ability to do secret operations not subject to the requirements for authorization and reporting that are mandated for the CIA. Rummy's replacement Robert Gates has been reported to want to give the black-ops portfolio completely back to the CIA. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the War Czar idea is a play to keep a secret-war capability in Dick Cheney's hands, one not subject to the CIA's reporting requirements.

At a minimum, I hope that Congress will look more into this. The press, too, if our "press corps" can tear themselves away from montoring the fashion statements they think the Democratic candidates are making with their attire and from defending their good buddy Don Imus.

Tags: dick cheney, iraq, iraq war, michael novak, pope benedict XVI, robert fisk, tom ricks

More questions on the secret war against Iran

Prior to the Patrick Cockburn story mentioned in my previous post, Robert Fish of the Independent also pointed to the secret war against Iran and its relation to the seizure of the British sailors in The war of humiliation 04/02/07:

But behind all this lie some dark questions - with, I fear, some still unknown but dark answers. The Iranian security services are convinced that the British security services are trying to provoke the Arabs of Iran's Khuzestan province to rise up against the Islamic Republic. Bombs have exploded there, one of them killing a truck-load of Revolutionary Guards, and Tehran blamed MI5. Outrageous, they said. Inexcusable.

The Brits made no comment, even when the Iranians hanged a man accused of the killings from a crane; he had, they said, been working for London.

Are the SAS in south-western Iran, just as the British claim the Iranians are in south-eastern Iraq, harassing the boys in Basra with new-fangled bombs? Will the Americans release the five Iranians issuing visas to Kurds in Arbil whom they locked up a couple of months ago. No, says Bush. Well, we shall see.

Tags: iran, iran war, robert fisk

Robert Fisk on the fuzziness of the "terror" concept

Robert Fisk points out how the notion of "terror" is being applied to a wide variety of activities, real and imagined, in order to bamboozle the publics of Europe and America and other places as well: Please spare me the word 'terrorist' The Independent 02/03/07

Lebanon is as good a place as any to find out what a load of old tosh the "terror" merchants talk. For here it is that the hydra-headed monster of Iran is supposedly stalking the streets of Beirut, staging a coup against Mr Siniora and his ministers.

But he observes that Hizbullah leader, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, though hardly a nice guy, is making his presence known in some ways that scarcely qualify as "terror" in any normal sense of the word:

Now it's true that Nasrallah - an intelligent, former military commander of Hizbollah in southern Lebanon - is developing a rather odd cult of personality. His massive features tower over the Beirut airport highway, a giant hand waving at motorists in both directions. And these days, you can buy Hizbollah T-shirts and Nasrallah key chains. But somehow "terror" is not quite the word that comes to mind.

Fisk points out that the poor among the Shi'a are finding in Hizbullah a real vehicle for defending their interests. It should go without saying - though in America these days it apparently does not - that observing this fact does not constitute any across-the-board endorsement by Fisk of the Hizbullah organization. His reporting is notable for bringing out the negative sides of the groups he covers as well as observing their strengths realistically. He writes of this aspect of Hizbullah:

... the tens of thousands of Shia Muslims whom Hizbollah represents are staging a social revolution rather than a coup, a mass uprising of the poor who have traditionally been ignored by the great and the good of Lebanese society. ...

The bright lights of downtown Beirut were enjoyed by the rich and purchased by the Saudis and admired by the likes of Jacques Chirac but they were not for the Shia. For them, Hizbollah provided the social services and the economic foundation of its part of Lebanon as well as the military spearhead to strike at Israel and demand the return of Shebaa Farms.

Fisk also notes that, however overblown and cynical the war propaganda now coming from the Cheney-Bush administration about Iran, Lebanon is caught up in conflicts among countries outside its own borders:

Of course, the crisis in Lebanon is also about Iran and Syria, especially Iran's determination to damage or destroy any Middle East government which has earned America's friendship. In the growing, overheated drama being played out between Washington and Tehran (and Israel, of course), Lebanon is another board game for the two sides to use. America thus lined up to defend Lebanon's democracy - though it didn't care a damn about it when Israel bombarded the country last summer - while Iran continues to support Hizbollah whose government ministers resigned last year, provoking the current crisis.

Tags: iran, lebanon, robert fisk