Fierce Firefight in Fallujah Leaves 13 Dead, 14 Wounded

AP reports that US Marines in Fallujah came under fire late Thursday, starting a firefight that continued through Friday and spilled over into an industrial area of the city. The Marines fired mortar rounds and called in close air support. AP writes, "Many of those wounded, including at least one child, appeared to be civilians injured by U.S. airstrikes, hospital officials said . . . Twelve auto repair shops and two houses were reported destroyed."

A loud explosion also went off late Friday in downtown Baghdad, but no details were available.

AP reports of US casualties:

The latest identifications reported by the Defense Department:

- Army Spc. Joseph F. Herndon, II, 21, Derby, Kan.; died Thursday, in Hawijah, Iraq, when he was shot while on guard duty; assigned to the Army's 1st Battalion, 27th Infantry, 25th Infantry Division (Light); Schofield Barracks, Hawaii.

- Army Pfc. Ken W. Leisten, 20, Cornelius, Ore.; died Wednesday, in Taji, Iraq, when his vehicle struck an explosive; assigned to the Army National Guards 2nd Battalion, 162nd Infantry; Corvallis, Ore.

909 US troops had died in Iraq as of Friday since the beginning of the war.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Did al-Qaeda Game Bush into Iraq War?

Douglas Jehl of the New York Times explains how Ibn al-Shaykh Libi, a high al-Qaeda official of Libyan extraction, was captured in fall of 2001 and alleged to CIA interrogators that Iraq had provided al-Qaeda with training in chemical and biological weapons.

Later on, Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Shaykh Muhammad were captured in Pakistan. Abu Zubaydah was wounded in the course of being captured and was put on heavy duty pain killers, and was interrogated in part while under their influence. Both he and KSM maintained that Bin Laden had forbidden any operational cooperation with Iraq, because it was ruled by an infidel secular Arab socialist regime.

When the CIA came back to Libi with these statements of his colleagues, he folded and admitted he had lied.

What is going on here? It has been suggested that Libi told the CIA whatever they wanted to hear because they tortured him. But there is another possibility, which is that he deliberately misled them. Libi is also the source of a report in January 2002 that al-Qaeda had targeted the US naval base in Bahrain. That allegation was never confirmed, and it is possible that it was also a lie, intended to draw US resources away from Afghanistan, or to make the US cautious about using the base.

I think Bin Laden and his lieutenants wanted to provoke wars between the US and Muslim states. I think they knew that the 9/11 attacks would guarantee a US war on Afghanistan, and that they were confident they could draw the US into the country and defeat it, as they had the Soviets.

That they were trying to provoke a US/Afghanistan war and knew their actions would provoke one is suggested in several ways. First, they made no effort to have the hijackers on 9/11 employ aliases or cover their tracks. A toddler could have traced Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdar back to al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. They made their reservations under their own names! All of the hijackers had. Counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke was astounded that these men had even been let on the planes under those names, many of which were well known to US intelligence. Likewise, Bin Laden hand-picked the Saudi "muscle" that he sent along at the last minute, from among young men personally loyal to him, and who would be known to be his men. September 11 was a way of waving a huge red flag from Afghanistan at the American bull.

Two days before 9/11, al-Qaeda agents posing as Algerian newsmen blew up Ahmad Shah Masoud, the gallant leader of the Northern Alliance. Clearly, Bin Laden had gamed out the aftermath of 9/11 and understood that the US might well try to partner with the Northern Alliance against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and he wanted to reduce the military effectiveness of the NA by eliminating its most talented strategist, Massoud.

Bin Laden, in choosing the "muscle" to be 15 Saudis, also was clearly attempting to alienate the US from the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, in hopes of weakening the regime in Riyadh and preparing it for overthrow by radical Islamists.

Libi's story about Iraq training al-Qaeda, delivered after 9/11, is of a piece with the rest of this strategy. It was aimed at instigating a war by the US on Iraq.

All of these wars were intended to stir hatred of the US invader throughout the Muslim world, to weaken the "puppet" governments of the Middle East that were allied with the US and make them ripe for overthrow, and to mire the US in a series of Islamic quagmires that would sap its will and strength and ultimately force its withdrawal from the region.

In form, the Libi strategy resembles the Maoist hope that the rural third world could be brought into a confrontation with the industrialized capitalist countries, one in which contradictions would be sharpened and the capitalist minority ultimately surrounded and overwhelmed by socialist villagers. Substitute "radical Islamist" for "socialist" and you have the Libi plan.

If al-Qaeda wanted wars between the US and Muslim countries, why would Abu Zubayda and Khalid Shaikh Muhammad have told the US the truth? I can only speculate, of course. But Abu Zubayda may have been debriefed while badly wounded and heavily sedated, and may not have had his wits entirely about him, so that he reacted with anger and hatred at the Baathist regime when it was brought up. Khalid Shaikh Muhammad was not arrested until March of 2003, and may have delighted in revealing to the US that it had been duped after the war began on March 19.

Even though Libi recanted his earlier disinformation, Vice President Dick Cheney has continued to rely on his allegations. Note that it should no longer be necessary for the US to depend on a single unreliable source such as Libi, since it has captured the Baath intelligence files and should by now know pretty much exactly what the Baath government was up to with regard to terrorism. If the US does not know, it would be because it irresponsibly gave those intelligence files to Ahmad Chalabi.

Chalabi was playing the US from the other side, feeding it disinformation about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaeda ties that was just made up out of whole cloth.

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz allowed themselves to be manipulated by Libi and Chalabi because it suited them.

The question is whether letting ourselves be duped in this way suits the American public.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Muqtada warns Muslim Nations

In his Friday prayer sermon on Friday before hundreds of followers in Kufa, radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr warned Muslim nations not to send troops to Iraq, warning that they would be considered collaborators with the US Occupation, and would risk being hit as such by Iraqis.

His warning was echoed by radical Sunni clergymen, as well.

Al-Zaman says that Muqtada also explained his two month long disappearance in part by reference to a schism within the Sadr movement, begun by his father. (He may have been referring to the opposition of many Sadrists, including his former mentor Ayatollah Kadhim al-Haeri in Qom, to the uprising he launched in April against the US in response to Washington's attempt to arrest or kill him.)

Muqtada also vehemently criticized the government of caretaker PM Iyad Allawi for failing to provide services and security.

He complained that the United States had succeeded in globalizing the world (`awlamat al-`alam). He called for resistance not just in Iraq but everywhere people were suffering oppression.



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Humanitarian Crisis looms in Basra

Reuters reports that a high UN official has raised the specter of a serious humanitarian crisis (i.e. lots of people dying) in Basra this summer. The problem is that there is only half as much potable water as people need for a population of 1.3 million, and the temperature has soared to 50 C / 122 F. Reuters writes:

"We are confronting a potential serious humanitarian crisis," Ross Mountain, acting special representative of the U.N. Secretary General for Iraq, told Reuters in Amman on Thursday.

"We have no indication that there is anywhere else in the country that is facing this kind of crisis. Nobody is facing 50 degree (Celsius) temperatures with less than half the supply of water required ... There is nowhere as bad as the Basra area."

Lack of potable water in a city like Basra can cause large numbers of deaths in several ways. Simple e. coli bacteria in the water can give babies and small children diarrhea so bad that they can easily die of it if parents don't know how to keep them hydrated (spoonfuls of filtered, boiled water with sugar and salt in it will usually work). You could also get a cholera epidemic and hepatitis. And, if people run out of boiled water because they lack or can't afford fuel to prepare more, they can be driven by the 122 temperatures to risk drinking bad water.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

National Congress Postponed
Fighting in Nasiriyah

In a sign that the political situation in Iraq is even worse than anyone had suspected, the caretaker Iraqi government has had to postpone the holding of national congress until mid-August. The complicated selection process for choosing delegates had favored the expatriate parties and politicians, and had stirred up bad feelings by important players who felt excluded. The Sunnis of largely Shiite Basra are among those constituencies that felt shortchanged by the process. So far no press reporting I have seen has given the full details of the floor fights in key cities, but apparently in some cases they have been vicious.

One group that feels shortchanged is the religious Shiites, whose parties have not been given the sort of representation their size and influence would merit. An aide to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, according to NPR, has urged Iraqi Shiites to be patient, and to put their hopes in the January 2005 elections.

The problem is that this postponement is not a good sign for the country's ability to hold one person, one vote parliamentary elections only five months from now.

Meanwhile, Italian troops in Nasiriyah clashed with militiamen who tried to take control of two bridges into the city. The militiamen were not identified but are likely to be followers of Muqtada al-Sadr. These sorts of incidents suggest that PM Allawi really is just the mayor of downtown Baghdad, and that neither the Iraqi government nor the US-led coalition really are in control of Iraq's cities. (-ash-Sharq al-Awsat)

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

The Kerry Plan on Iraq:
How it Could Work if the UN were Brought In

In his speech to the National Democratic Convention, John Kerry devoted a few passages to Iraq. He said:

"I know what we have to do in Iraq. We need a president who has the credibility to bring our allies to our side and share the burden, reduce the cost to American taxpayers, and reduce the risk to American soldiers. That's the right way to get the job done and bring our troops home.

Here is the reality: that won't happen until we have a president who restores America's respect and leadership - so we don't have to go it alone in the world.

And we need to rebuild our alliances, so we can get the terrorists before they get us."

Media pundits are already charging that these passages are vague and lack specifics. I thought I would try to envision how this plan might work in the real world.

The first problem with involving the international community is that the US effort in Iraq lacks international legitimacy. Moreover, the Bush administration has insisted that the troops of its coalition partners (some of whom, like the Poles, are being paid by the US to be in Iraq) remain under over-all United States military command. This demand is unacceptable to most countries that might plausibly supply troops.

For instance, Colin Powell has been speaking with the Saudis about the possibility of a Muslim military force to help stabilize Iraq. But most Muslim countries would refuse to go under a US military command, as this report from the Scotsman notes:

' In Jakarta yesterday, Indonesian foreign ministry spokesman Marty Natalegawa said: “Our position remains that any possible Indonesian involvement, including dispatching our military personnel to Iraq, has to be within and under a UN framework.”

Yemen had offered earlier this month to help in a UN mission in Iraq, provided all coalition forces withdraw . . .

Commenting on the Muslim force proposal, Arab League envoy to Britain Ali Hamid said in London that the idea could gain international support as long as it was accompanied by a clear US commitment to withdraw from Iraq and was mandated by the United Nations Security Council.

Many Arab countries have indicated they would be willing to get more involved in Iraq if they can do so under the UN, rather than a perceived US, umbrella. '

So the big stumbling block is the US auspices of the foreign occupation of Iraq, and Bush administration insistence on the US leading the over-all military command.

Another problem is that the European Community simply does not have many spare troops to send abroad, so the EU is unlikely to be the solution here. (They are likely to be busier and busier with Afghanistan, anyway).

So here is how the Kerry plan could work, with specifics.

Let us say that Iraq really does hold parliamentary elections in January of 2005, and that the new government elects a prime minister. The resulting Iraqi government would have full international legitimacy, and would be in a position to play a strong role at the UN, on the Arab League, and other international bodies.

Let us say that the new Iraq Prime Minister gets the backing of his cabinet and parliament to go to the United Nations Security Council and ask for a UN peace-enforcing effort. (Bosnia is an analogous precedent). The Kerry Administration ambassador to the UN supports this effort, as do the UK, France, China and Russia, along with the rotating members.

The UN Resolution should specify that UN troops in Iraq have the right to use force to enforce the peace. That is, they would not be mere observers or peacekeepers, but active peace enforcers.

The UN peace enforcing military mission in Iraq would be funded by a special fund, to which the US, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries would contribute, since it is in all their interests that Iraq be stabilized.

The UN Security Council and the Iraqi government would then go the Arab League seeking a commitment from it to support peace-enforcement in Iraq. At this point, Egypt gets on board, and swings the others to support the proposal.

The Iraqi government, the UNSC and the Arab League then go to non-neighbor Muslim and other countries and ask for about 10,000 men from each. Each two such half-divisions would allow the US to rotate out a division of its own. If 10 countries could be convinced to come in, all but two US divisions could leave. If the effort were seen as one of ending the US occupation by supplanting the US with a UN/Arab League force, many governments that now fear to buck their own public opinion by collaborating with the US might be in a much better position to send troops. Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Yemen and Morocco could all easily spare 10,000 troops each, and more such partners could be found. Perhaps under these conditions even the French and the Russians would be willing to come in, as well. The British would stay for as long as necessary, though likely the Poles and others would want to rotate out early in 2005. That would be all right, since under this plan they could be replaced. Some countries might supply police or gendarmes rather than military troops, as needed in the provinces to which they were assigned (Samawah might just need civilian police for a while; al-Anbar probably needs military troops).

Remember that the poorer countries involved would receive substantial reimbursement for coming aboard. They would also be in line to receive "strategic rent" from the US and other wealthy countries--debt forgiveness, favorable trade treaties, etc. Countries like Russia and France would enhance the access of their companies to the Iraqi market once the security situation had settled down.

This genuinely multinational force could intervene wherever order broke down so badly that Iraqi police and security forces could not handle it. They would be backed up where necessary by US air power for as long as the Iraqi government and the UN wanted it.

The UN force would have as its mandate to help negotiate a final settlement with the Kurds and to supervise the integration of the peshmerga and the Shiite militias into the new Iraqi army, which would have mixed units for national cohesion. It would also work to develop safeguards for minority rights so as to mollify the Sunni Arabs in places like al-Anbar. (That there would be a strong Sunni Muslim presence among the UN troops might help in this mollifying process, though it would not change the fact that the parliament is Shiite-dominated).

This UN force, with vastly reduced US participation under a UN general, would give the new, elected Iraqi government time to rebuild its own armed forces and national guard. As effective Iraqi divisions were trained and equipped, they could begin relieving UN troops, allowing all the multinational forces, including those of the US, gradually to rotate out of the country as they were no longer needed. At the end of this process, Iraq would have an army of 60,000 men, able to maintain order in the country but posing no threat to neighbors. It would be an independent country, midwifed by the United Nations. The US would have finally gracefully exited the country, since it is unlikely that an elected Iraqi government would want foreign troops on its soil any longer than necessary.

I would be the first to admit that the plan is not perfect. Sometimes UN troops have not performed very well. Iraq is a complex and highly armed society, and would be the biggest challenge ever faced by the UN. But I think the plan has at least a chance of working. And, it is hard to see how it could produce results worse than those produced by the Bush administration in the past miserable 16 months.

Addendum 2:00 pm Friday 7/30: In response to some of my mail about this post:

1) Someone said that Bush might do this sort of thing if he were elected, anyway. The answer is no. He will not and cannot. My model presupposes a willingness to surrender military command of the multinational force to the UN, which Bush will never, ever do. In the absence of that step, you cannot pick up the Indonesian, Malaysian, etc. troops. They have elections and it would guarantee their governments to be kicked out of office by the voters if they put their troops under US command in Iraq.

2) Someone else said that the Russians and the French are unlikely to come in. That may be so, but we cannot know without trying. The combination of UN leadership and the opportunity to enhance business opportunities for their firms in Iraq and the Gulf, plus the assertion of a geo-strategic role and an American acknowledgment of their necessity as allies could all work together to persuade. Still, their participation would not be absolutely essential.

3) It was asserted that the 3rd world military contingents are likely to be lightweights and not up to the job of facing down the Sunni insurgents. This assertion is unfair. The Pakistani, Egyptian and other militaries are professional and have had experience with counter-insurgency against radical Islamists, and their governments are still there because they have won. The Arabic-speaking units would be in a much better position than the Americans to develop good intelligence on the insurgency. Moreover, my model assumes that the Sunni Arab insurgency will greatly subside, given the legitimacy of a UN military mission and the participation of many Sunni troops. Likewise, it assumes that the Kurdish north and the Shiite south remain relatively stable.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

120 Dead in Bombings, Clashes in Iraq
4 US Troops Killed

Wire services report that 120 persons died in separate incidents in Iraq on Wednesday, the one-month anniversary of the "transfer of sovereignty" to the caretaker government of Iyad Allawi.

The NYT says that guerrillas detonated a truck bomb outside a police recruiting station in the eastern city of Baqubah, killing 70 and wounding 55. NPR reported that the mood in the city was condemnatory of the attack, and that many feel that the Iraqi police are not collaborators with the US but rather Iraqi patriots. But NPR uncharacteristically missed the point, which is that the guerrillas do not care with whom people sympathize. The key question is whether they will be afraid to go sign up to serve in Allawi's police, and to cooperate with the caretaker government in general.

In the south-central city of Suwariyah, multinational forces and Iraqi police battled guerrillas, killing 35 of them. The guerrillas killed 7 Iraqi policemen. Rumors swirled that some of the guerrillas had come over from Iran, but the Polish military spokesman said he had no evidence of this. It would matter whether Suwariyah is mainly Sunni or Shiite, not something I was able to find out (the area south of Baghdad is mixed). Why don't reporters ask these questions?

Guerrillas used roadside bombs to kill two US troops, and two others died in small arms fights in al-Anbar province. Their deaths raised the toll to 906 since the war began, according to AP.

Guerrillas killed two Pakistani hostages, saying that the Pakistani government was considering sending troops to Iraq (to guard the UN HQ, to be headed by a Pakistani diplomat).

The Guardian adds, "There were also shootings and clashes in the western city of Ramadi and the northern city of Kirkuk. Central Baghdad descended into chaos after a rocket hit a busy street, killing two people and wounding four, including three children."

Guerrillas kidnapped three sons of the governor of al-Anbar Province, Abdul Karim Burghis al-Rawi, in Ramadi. The provincial governors have largely been chosen in a complicated process over which the Americans and British had a great deal of influence, and many guerrillas consider them puppets.

In an important Australian Broadcasting Co. interview, Anthony Cordesmann explains in some detail why Iraqi forces cannot deal with the guerrilla insurgency, lacking proper equipment and even communications. It is not a pretty picture.

According to Reuters, on Wednesday Iraq weapons inspector David Kay said that

U.S. officials should give up the "delusional hope" that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction so they can move forward with reform . . . "I think it's most important that the president of the United States recognizes that in fact the weapons are not there," Kay told reporters after speaking at The Government Security Expo and Conference. "It's because until you do that you will not take this fundamental reorganization of the intel community on board," he said. Officials such as acting CIA Director John McLaughlin "hold out the delusional hope that eventually you'll find weapons," Kay said.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Cheney Watch

Vice President Dick Cheney gave his stump speech in Utah on Wednesday, attempting to rally the Republican faithful while the national spotlight remained on the Democrats. Rebecca Walsh reports:

Cheney said terrorists are as determined to destroy America as the "Axis powers" of Germany, Italy and Japan during World War II. Borrowing a quote from the 9-11 Commission's report on the terrorist attacks of Sept. 2001, the vice president said the terrorists are "sophisticated, patient, disciplined and lethal."
"This enemy is perfectly prepared to slaughter anyone man, woman and child to achieve its ends," Cheney said. "This is not an enemy we can reason with. This is an enemy we must vanquish."

Although it may be true that al-Qaeda is as determined to destroy the US as the Axis Powers were in World War II, this observation is a Himalayan exaggeration if it is meant to suggest a parallel. Al-Qaeda is a few thousand fanatics mainly distributed in a handful of countries. If Zacharias Moussaoui and Richard Reid are any indication, a lot of them are one step away from from collecting old soda cans on the street in their grocery carts while mumbling about the radios the government implanted in their asses.

So while their determination may be impressive (or just creepy), they are not comparable to the might of three industrialized dictatorships with populations in the tens of millions. Some 13 million men served in the German army (Heer) alone between 1935 and 1945. (And WW II killed 55 million persons, not 3 thousand).

I repeat, al-Qaeda proper only has a few hundred fighters, those who pledged allegiance personally to Bin Laden, and a few thousand if you count other Afghan Arabs and their ideological soul mates. Most of them are not wealthy or trained or competent, and a lot are just crackpots. (Read an account of the misadventures of Richard Reid again). September 11 was possible mainly because Ramzi Bin al-Shibh lucked out and managed to recruit some high-powered engineering Ph.D. students in Hamburg who knew something serious about kinetic energy. The organization does not have a lot of persons of that caliber, though Cheney has done everything in his power to make them easier for al-Qaeda to recruit.

These few thousand scruffy terrorists are not comparable to the Axis in any significant dimension except maybe "determination" (which they share with all kinds of cults around the world, including Aum Shinrikyo).

The question that I have, though, is why, if Dick Cheney is in fact so desperately worried about al-Qaeda, he hasn't done more about it. Of the 1000 or so al-Qaeda operatives who fled to Pakistan, 500 or so have been captured, almost all of them by the Pakistani military. Although there are 20,000 US troops in Afghanistan, they have captured no top al-Qaeda leaders at all to my knowledge. In fact, it is difficult for me to understand what exactly they are doing there. The Pushtun warlords all around them are selling $2 billion of heroin annually to Europe, to which you would have thought the US might object (and isn't it likely some of the $2 billion is going straight to al-Qaeda?)

Usamah Bin Laden and Aiman al-Zawahiri, who sat down in a room and planned out September 11 are still free. They are still plotting against the US and its allies. Chatter suggests that the bombings in Istanbul were encouraged by al-Zawahiri.

So let's get this straight. The US has 138,000 troops stuck in Iraq, which was no danger to the US homeland. They are mainly fighting local clansmen who had never before had any beef with the US, prior to the American invasion of their country.

If Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri are the SS of the age, then why aren't 138,000 US troops combing Waziristan for them? Why haven't they been captured?

If al-Qaeda is the equivalent of the WW II Axis, why didn't the US liaise with Moroccan and Spanish security to prevent the Madrid bombings? How many FBI and CIA operatives do we even have in Rabat and Casablanca? Does Cheney even know the name of the Moroccan minister of intelligence? There is no evidence that he is making the fight against al-Qaeda any sort of top priority.

Cheney is lying again. Iraq is obviously a much greater priority for him than is fighting al-Qaeda. All the country's military resources are being sunk into Iraq. Silly decisions are made on macho grounds like deciding to besiege Fallujah or arrest Muqtada al-Sadr (from both endeavors Cheney had to slink away with his tail between his legs, because political considerations got in the way of mere application of massive force).

Why is Iraq a bigger priority for Cheney than is fighting al-Qaeda? Because there are corporate profits to be made in Iraq. There are virtually none in Afghanistan or the Pakistani tribal regions. Cheney wants to crucify the Bill of Rights on the cross of "national security," but has avoided doing the one thing that would make us both free and safe. That is developing a serious counter-insurgency plan for the Middle East that wins hearts and minds and deals effectively with asymmetrical threats. All his emphasis has been on dealing with governments, like that of Iraq, which can be defeated militarily, and the defeat of which unlocks national resources for American companies to exploit. The problem is that those governments do not pose a threat to the US mainland. To the extent that there is a threat, it comes from a shadowy network of radical Islamist guerrillas. Cheney is doing virtually nothing about them.

Not only has Cheney failed to win hearts and minds, but Bush/Cheney policies have made the US less popular than ever in the Middle East. In the past two years, positive views of America have dwindled alarmingly. The Washington Post reports of the recent Zogby poll,

"In 2002, the single policy issue that drove opinion was the Palestinians; now it's Iraq and America's treatment, here and abroad, of Arabs and Muslims," said James Zogby, who commissioned the report with the Arab American Institute.

In Zogby's 2002 survey, 76 percent of Egyptians had a negative attitude toward the United States, compared with 98 percent this year. In Morocco, 61 percent viewed the country unfavorably in 2002, but in two years, that number has jumped to 88 percent. In Saudi Arabia, such responses rose from 87 percent in 2002 to 94 percent in June. Attitudes were virtually unchanged in Lebanon but improved slightly in the UAE, from 87 percent who said in 2002 that they disliked the United States to 73 percent this year.

Those polled said their opinions were shaped by U.S. policies, rather than by values or culture. When asked: "What is the first thought when you hear 'America'?" respondents overwhelmingly said: "Unfair foreign policy."

And when asked what the United States could do to improve its image in the Arab world, the most frequently provided answers were "Stop supporting Israel" and "Change your Middle East policy."

Those people being polled are the recruitment pool for al-Qaeda. You want to get them on America's side, not drive them further away. Bush/Cheney have completely alienated them. And, no, you can't just scare them or beat them into submission. Cheney's plan to conquer Iraq has been implemented. After defeating the Iraqi army hands down and pouring a sixth of a million of troops into the country, the US still hasn't managed to scare or cow the Iraqis into submission. The lesson the other Arabs take away from the mounting toll of dead and wounded US troops is that America can be taken on, if not on the battlefield, then with guerrilla tactics.

Hey, we were trying to convince them that we can't be taken on with those methods, and that there isn't any need to do so anyway since the US poses no danger to them. Instead, Bush/Cheney have actually managed to convince the few Muslims who had positive views of us to change their minds!

Four more years of this kind of "success," and we really will be in danger.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraqi Economy in Travail

Ken Dilanian reports on the woes of the Iraqi economy. His general impression is that unemployment remains between 28 percent and 50 percent; that foreign investment is not coming in; that expatriate Iraqis are not investing; and that among the biggest setbacks was the stupid American decision to besiege Fallujah and attack Muqtada al-Sadr in April (Dilanian doesn't put it that way, of course). Virtually the only bright spEot is that government employees have had pay raises and are buying consumer goods (though a lot of that money goes abroad).

I was driving in Florida last week, and someone had put the radio on a rightwing talk station. This glib announcer did a quick interview with some US official in Baghdad, and asked him leading questions about what great news it was that the Iraqi stock market had opened. He obviously had an ideological agenda and wasn't actually interested in what Iraq is really like.

Dilanian reports,

"Even the bright spots have a dark underside. Iraq's stock exchange finally reopened in June, and the start of trading is heralded with the ringing of a small brass bell donated by the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, bearing the words, "Let Freedom Ring." But exchange officials are so worried about security that they have scarcely publicized the reopening. Trading is two days a week, by appointment only. Armed guards keep out members of the public."

My anecdote about the rightwing radio station in Florida sheds a little light on all those poll numbers showing that 45 percent of Americans still have an optimistic view of the situation in Iraq.

Henry T. Azzam makes some similar points, though he is mysteriously more upbeat about the stock market (trading is $10 million a day, which does not impress me.)

It seems obvious that the security situation is determining the economy, and nothing good can be expected until security is restored. That is, successful counter-insurgency will be everything.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Arguing with Cheney

Reuters reports that Dick Cheney was doing some counter-programming to the Democratic National Convention by speaking on the West Coast at Camp Pendleton.

He said, “Terrorist attacks are not caused by the use of strength. They are invited by the perception of weakness.”

This statement is half right and half wrong. Some terrorist attacks are caused by the use of strength. For instance, the Shiites of southern Lebanon had positive feelings toward Israel before 1982. They were not very politically mobilized. Then the Israelis invaded Lebanon in 1982 and occupied the South. They killed some 18,000 persons, 9,000 of them estimated to be innocent civilians. The Shiites of the South gradually turned against them and started hitting them to get them back out of their country. They formed Hizbullah and ultimately shelled Israel itself and engaged in terrorism in Europe and Argentina. So, Hizbullah terrorist attacks were certainly caused by Sharon's use of "strength."

On the other hand, it is the case that a perception of weakness can invite terrorist attacks by ambitious and aggressive enemies. Usamah Bin Laden recites a litany of instances in which the United States abruptly withdrew when attacked, and takes comfort in the idea of the US as a paper tiger. He instances Reagan's 1983 withdrawal from Beirut after the Marine barracks was bombed and Clinton's departure from Somalia after the Blackhawk Down incident.

The lesson I take away from all this is that the US should not get involved in places that it may get thrown out of, because that projects an image of weakness and vulnerability to the country's enemies. There was no way the United States could possibly have maintained a presence in Lebanon in the early 1980s, and Reagan was foolish to put those Marines in there, and even more foolish to put them in without pilons around them to stop truck bombs. The country was embroiled in a civil war, and it would have taken a massive commitment of troops to make a difference. In the wake of the Vietnam failure, the American public would not have countenanced such a huge troop build-up. Likewise, Bush senior was foolish to send those troops to Somalia in the way he did (which became a poison pill for his successor, Bill Clinton).

The question is whether the quagmire in Iraq makes the US look weak. The answer is yes. Therefore, by Cheney's own reasoning, it is a mistake that opens us to further attacks.

Reuters reports, "Cheney said Americans were safer and he stood by prewar characterizations of Iraq as a threat despite the failure to find weapons of mass destruction and new warnings by Cheney and other administration officials that another major terrorist attack may be coming."

Iraq was not a threat to the United States. Period. Let me repeat the statistics as of the late 1990s:

US population: 295 million
Iraq population: 24 million

US per capita annual income: $37,600
Iraq per capita annual income: $700

US nuclear warheads: 10,455
Iraq nuclear warheads: 0

US tons of lethal chemical weapons (1997): 31,496
Iraq tons of lethal chemical weapons (1997): 0

While a small terrorist organization could hit the US because it has no return address, a major state could not hope to avoid retribution and therefore would be deterred. Cheney knows that Baathist Iraq posed no threat to the US. He is simply lying. I was always careful not to accuse him of lying before the war because who knows what is in someone else's mind? Maybe he believed his own bullshit. But there is no longer any doubt that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, no active nuclear weapons program, no ability to deliver anything lethal to the US homeland, and no operational cooperation with al-Qaeda. These things are not matters of opinion. They are indisputable. Ipso facto, if an intelligent person continues to allege them, he is prevaricating.

“President Bush is determined to remove threats before they arrive instead of simply awaiting for another attack on our country. So America acted to end the regime of Saddam Hussein . . . Sixteen months ago, Iraq was a gathering threat to the United States and the civilized world. Now it is a rising democracy, an ally in the war on terror and the American people are safer for it.”

I have never understood the phrase "civilized world." To what exactly does it refer? How do you get into it? Can you drop out of it? Is Germany in it? How about 1933-1945? Is Egypt in it? (Surely it helped invent "civilization"?)

But the more important point is that a) there was no threat to the United States from the regime of Saddam Hussein, and there certainly was no gathering threat. The Iraqi military was more dilapidated by the hour; and b) It is obvious any situation that kills and maims thousands of US servicemen and women every year is not "making us safer" (the troops are part of "us", Mr. Cheney).

Even sections of the Republican Party are openly questioning Cheney's claims. Sen. Lincoln Chafee said that Iraq is more dangerous now than when he visited last October. He clearly fears that the Bush administration is planning to go after Iran, and suggests seeking cooperation from Tehran instead. (It worries me no end that Washington insiders like Chafee should be apprehensive about White House policy toward Iran, and confirms my suspicions that Tehran is next.)


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14 US Troops wounded by Mortar Fire in Baghdad
3 Iraqis die in Violence

Paul Garwood of AP reports that on Tuesday, guerrillas successfully launched four or five mortars at the Green Zone in Baghdad that houses the caretaker government and the British and American embassies, wounding 14 US troops. Eleven were returned to duty. Another mortar round fell on a nearby neighborhood, Salhiya, killing one Iraqi garbage collector and wounding another.

Guerrillas sprayed the automobile of Dr. Qassem Obaidi with gunfire, killing him late Monday. He was the assistant director of the Mahmoudiya Hospital about 25 miles south of Baghdad.

A suicide bomber detonated his car in the eastern city of Baquba, but did not manage to harm anyone else.

There have been two spectacular arrests of persons driving vehicles packed with mortars, mortar rounds and other deadly weaponry in the past two days. One vehicle was stopped by Iraqi police at Kut, and the other by Marines in al-Anbar province.


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Sunni Iraqis adopt Religious Radicalism
Others Support Saddam

Dan Murphy of the Christian Science Monitor reports on the way in which Sunni Iraqis are turning toward Salafi Islam. Salafis are sort of militantly Protestant Sunnis who reject the canons of medieval scholarship and strive to go back to the practice of the Prophet and his companions in early Islam. In recent decades Salafis have become a key recruitment pool for radical groups with a violent bent. The Sunni middle classes in Iraq had been relatively secular until recently, but the American conquest has caused many of them to turn to religion, some to radical religion.

Meanwhile, Ken Dilanian of the Philadelphia Inquirer, meanwhile, reports that substantial numbers of Sunnis in the upscale Adhamiyah quarter of Baghdad continue to support Saddam Hussein. He worries that this support for the fallen dictator bodes ill for the future of the country, given how much most Shiites and Kurds hate Saddam.

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Preoccupation with Iraq Slowed US, UK Response to Darfur Crisis

The Foreign Policy Centre in the UK is issuing a report that blames the Iraq War for the inability of the US and the UK to respond in a timely way to the genocide in Darfur, Sudan. Although the US has applied diplomatic pressure and threatened sanctions against Khartoum, the report maintains that the situation in Darfur developed at a time when London and Washington were preoccupied with Iraq and either disinclined or unable to intervene.

The UK and US are looking into whether the killing of 30,000 persons and the displacement of a million can be categorized in international law as genocide. Arabic-speaking nomads called Janjawid have targeted members of the farming Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa tribes. Most of the principals on both sides of the conflict are Arabic speaking Muslims, demonstrating that such ethnic markers do not explain everything, or sometimes very much, in the Middle East. In this case a traditon of provincial autonomy and conflicts between herders and settled farmers are more important.

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Margaret Cho and an Iraq Blog

I have been a fan of comedian Margaret Cho for years, and so was happy and surprised to see traffic coming from her site to mine. I found her appreciation of an Iraqi family's blog touching. As someone who has been interested in Iraq for more than 30 years, it is still surreal for me to find so many Americans now concerned with the place. What is refreshing about Margaret's comments, however, is her contrast between knowing about Iraqis in the abstract and encountering them on a human level.

There has been controversy over the gay and lesbian Human Rights Campaign's decision to rescind its invitation to Cho to preview some material from her "State of Emergency" tour at the Democratic National Convention. Their loss. And, luckily for her, there is no such thing as bad publicity in show biz.

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Clinton's Low-Key Dissing of Bush

Bill Clinton is perhaps the most gifted political orator of our generation, so it is worth considering how he dealt with Bush and the Iraq War issue in his speech Monday evening to the Democratic National Convention.

He and the other Democrats went out of their way to avoid appearing angry. They were full of regret at missed opportunities and wrong-headed policies, but they were not angry. They had hope, and a vision of an alternative future, which they implied was a much more comforting one than the Clint Eastwood Spaghetti Western into which W. has plunged us.

Clinton avoided looking as though they he was lukewarm in support of US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. He began by saying, "My friends, we are constantly being told that America is deeply divided. But all Americans value freedom and faith and family. We all honor the service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform, in Iraq, Afghanistan and throughout the world."

So the message is, pro- US troops. Nobody brought up Abu Ghuraib or the brutal siege of Fallujah.

The critique of Bush's Iraq war was made only subtly, with references to Clinton's presidency as an era of "peace and prosperity" (Hillary), and Clinton's own "We all want good jobs, good schools, health care, safe streets, a clean environment. We all want our children to grow up in a secure America leading the world toward a peaceful and prosperous future . . ."

The implication is that Bush is likely to lead us into more wars and further economic hard times. The Democratic Party in contrast is the party of peace and prosperity. (I.e., Clinton has cleverly once again stolen an old Republican line to use against the Republican Party).

What about the "turmoil in the Middle East," as Clinton put it? He spoke of the future as full of "amazing opportunities" "for people all across the world and to create a world where we can celebrate our religious, our racial, our ethnic, our tribal differences because our common humanity matters most of all . . ."

Clinton's message is that difference (race, religion, nation) need not be polarizing, that these sectional identities can be transcended by an appeal to common humanity. If Bush's world is Manichaean, characterized by a division of human beings into Good and Evil, the Democrats' world is organic, capable of being molded into a smoothly functioning whole. The Manichaean world-view implies warfare, the vision of organic unity allows for peace.

Clinton contrasted the cooperative and idealistic vision of the Democrats with what he depicted as a selfish and cynical opportunism among Republicans:

"We Democrats want to build a world and an America of shared responsibilities and shared benefits. We want a world with more global cooperation where we act alone only when we absolutely have to. We think the role of government should be to give people the tools to create the conditions to make the most of their own lives. And we think everybody should have that chance.

On the other hand, the Republicans in Washington believe that America should be run by the right people — their people — in a world in which America acts unilaterally when we can and cooperates when we have to . . ."

Clinton points to a moment of betrayal, when Bush failed to live up to the expectations of national unity and altruism raised by September 11:

"The president had an amazing opportunity to bring the country together under his slogan of compassionate conservatism and to unite the world in the struggle against terror. Instead, he and his congressional allies made a very different choice. They chose to use that moment of unity to try to push the country too far to the right and to walk away from our allies, not only in attacking Iraq before the weapons inspectors had finished their work, but in withdrawing American support for the climate change treaty and for the international court on war criminals and for the anti-ballistic missile treaty and from the nuclear test ban treaty. Now, now at a time when we're trying to get other people to give up nuclear and biological and chemical weapons, they are trying to develop two new nuclear weapons which they say we might use first."

The attack on Bush is not that he went to war against Iraq. It is that he did so virtually unilaterally, "walking away from our allies." This is a genteel way of saying that the Bush administration humiliated and demeaned France, Germany and later Spain, for not going along with the war or for later withdrawing from it in the case of Spain. Note that Clinton or his speech writer keep the focus on Bush, not foregrounding the allies (France is not popular). The crime is to "walk away" from old friends. Although complaints about this abandonment of old Europe would have had no resonance a year ago, by now it is obvious that it would be awfully nice to have a division each from France and Germany in Iraq, and that the Bush administration's gratuitous insults made it highly unlikely that such help will be forthcoming.

Likewise, the timing of the war rather than the war itself is criticized. The Bush administration orchestrated a UN resolution that put the weapons inspectors back in Iraq, but then attacked "Iraq before the weapons inspectors had finished their work." This impatient unilateralism also led, Clinton said, to the repudiation of Kyoto and other important international treaties. Bush is depicted as rash, hotheaded, impatient, and a dangerous loner.

Now Clinton ties the foreign misadventure to the domestic economy: "At home, the president and the Republican Congress have made equally fateful choices, which they also deeply believe in. For the first time when America was in a war footing in our whole history, they gave two huge tax cuts, nearly half of which went to the top 1 percent of us."

Clinton is saying that you were cheated out of your fair share of the tax break, a tax break that probably shouldn't have been given in the first place because of the extra demands of the war that shouldn't have been fought. The cumulative effect is to raise fears that a series of grave policy errors has been committed and that, worse, it has deleteriously affected you in the pocket book. It is one thing to have the US government mucking things up overseas. It is another for it to cheat you out of your fair share of a tax break.

I suspect that the Kerry-Edwards campaign will pick up on Clinton's themes. Not the war but the rush to war and unilateralism will be critiqued. Not the troops but the Bush administration officials will be faulted. The criticism will be subtle rather than blunt, and the theme will be hope rather than fear.

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8 Killed in Iraq Violence
3 US Soldiers Wounded in Mosul Bombing

Mark Turner of the Financial Times in Baghdad reports that the violence continues in Iraq. He writes, "The spate of post-transition violence in Iraq showed no sign of let-up yesterday, as insurgents bombed an airfield in Mosul, a senior interior ministry official was assassinated in Baghdad, gunmen opened fire on five women cleaners working for the US company Bechtel in Basra, and kidnappers seized two Jordanian drivers."

In Mosul guerrillas detonated a carbomb outside the gate of the airport, wounding 3 US soldiers and two Iraqi security men, and killing three bystanders along with the bomber.

A guerrilla assassinated Musab al-Awadi, an Interior Ministry deputy minister in charge of tribal affairs, who had been attempting to smooth relations with Sunni tribal chieftains in the strife-torn Sunni heartland.

Bloomberg also reports that guerrillas fired on a bus in Basra that was carrying workers for a Western company to the airport, killing two women and wounding three others. The employer is variously reported as Hart Security, a British company, and Bechtel.

Guerrillas continued to kidnap foreign guest workers in Iraq, having taken some 70 hostage in the past few months. The kidnappings have a dual purpose, serving as a means of extorting money from the hostages' families and employers, and as a way of forcing the employers out of the Iraq market. The extortion then funds the further activities of the terror cell. (This technique was pioneered by the tiny Abu Sayyaf terrorist group in the Philippines).

But his captors released an Egyptian diplomat on Monday.



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Shiite Parties Seek Power in National Assembly
Defense Minister slams Iran

Ashraf Khalil writes for the Los Angeles Times that the Shiite al-Da'wa Party is making an alliance with the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq in hopes of having significant influence in the 100-person Iraqi National Assembly to be elected at a convocation of 1000 notables to be held next week.

So far the religious parties are the main representatives of the Shiite majority in Iraq, and they seem likely to dominate any fairly elected parliament this winter.

Actually, the national congress will only elect 80 representatives. The other 20 will be members of the US-appointed Interim Governing Council. It is of course undemocratic that these appointees should be grandfathered into a body that is otherwise elected, and this undemocratic element is another example of the long arm of US proconsul Paul Bremer and his bosses in the Department of Defense.

Meanwhile, Minister of Defense Hazem Shaalan told al-Zaman he had evidence that Iran had given further training to militant Muslims who had fought in Afghanistan and then had given them free passage into Iraq. He cited in particular an Iran-backed Sudanese guerrilla who had been captured with a large amount of poison that he had intended to dump into the water supply of the southern town of Diwaniyyah. He said Iran had infiltrated spies into Iraq and had penetrated every part of the Iraqi government. Shaalan was contradicted by Iraqi ambassador to Washington, Rend Rahim Franke, who maintained that the Iranians had detained some 200 radical fighters trying to transit to Iraq from Afghanistan.

Shaalan's charge of Iranian infiltration of the government is reminiscent of McCarthy-era fears in the US of Communist infiltration. He seems more excercised by the issue than virtually anyone else in the government. I wonder if, as a secular Iraqi Shiite, he is worried about the coming potential dominance of religious Shiite parties, supported by Tehran. If so, charges of an Iran connection could be employed to exclude some Shiite parties or figures from the political process on grounds of treason.

Al-Zaman also reports that an official in the Secret Police protested rumors that the reconstituted security service had hired back large numbers of Baathist agents. He said that ex-Baathists were no more than 5% of the new Secret Police, and that they had not been Saddam's men nor did they have blood on their hands.

Personally, I find it implausible that there were agents of the Iraqi secret police that were not Saddam's men and who did not have blood on their hands.

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Brahimi: Iraq War Caused More Problems than it Solved, Brought Terrorism to Iraq

Deutsche Press Agentur reports that former UN special envoy to Iraq, Lakhdar Brahimi, expresed deep criticism of the Bush administration's Iraq war in an Austrian newspaper interview. Excerpts:

' [Brahimi] said Iraq would no doubt recover from the chaos in which it was presently. ''The question is only, how long will it take? And what will the normalization cost?'' The price up till now had already been very high . . . Brahimi said the resistance in Iraq was difficult to analyze. Alongside the old cadres of the Baath regime of Saddan Hussein, there was a strong group of Iraqis which for patriotic reasons attacked any form of occupation. . .

Here, action was needed by the Interim Government of Iyad Allawi.

''It must prove that it has real sovereignty, and that it's not just a puppet of the Americans. But that's difficult with 150,000 foreign soldiers in the country.'' . . .

Asked whether the Iraq war had harmed the ''war on terrorism'', Brahimi said: ''The Iraq war was unnecessary. It created more problems than it solved - and it brought terrorism to Iraq.''

Brahimi, who was formerly U.N. envoy for Afghanistan, warned that the country was on a dangerous course. The regional warlords had too much power and influence. ''There are presently developments similar to those events of 1992 which led the Taliban to success.'' At that time, Afghans had welcomed the Taliban as liberators from the chaos and arbitrary rule of the regional warlords, said Brahimi.

Brahimi clearly worries that Iraq may be headed toward major civil disturbances of the sort that have wracked his own country (and left over 100,000 dead). That is what he means by his remark that the Iraq war created more problems than it solved.


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Brown: Israel-Palestine: Walled In

Kenneth L. Brown gives us a guest editorial on the Israeli security wall being built in the Occupied West Bank. A form of it earlier appeared in an Italian newspaper, Europa. It is worth revisiting in the light of the light of the finding of the World Court in the Hague that the Wall is illegal, and in light of the subsequent UN General Assembly denunciation of it. Jeremy Pressman and Joel Beinin earlier weighed in on the subject here.

Israel-Palestine: Walled In

At the end of last year, the UN General Assembly had passed a resolution requesting the International Court of Justice in the Hague to render an urgent opinion regarding the legality of the construction of the separation barrier.

Eyal Weizman, an Israeli architect based in Tel-Aviv, argues that the border between Israel and Palestinians is no longer a single continuous line, but a sequence of convoluted boundaries, security apparatuses and internal checkpoints---a series of unstable pockets. (see "Ariel Sharon and the Geometry of Occupation" at www.opendemocracy.net.) The Sharon government is preparing a fragmented Palestinian state by establishing facts on the ground,––– scattered and separated territorial islands surrounded and perforated by Israeli territory. A state without borders to the outside world. These islands will be, strung together by tunnels and bridges under and over Israeli territory and they will have no jurisdiction over water resources or airspace.

Israel has periodically launched major operations in cities like Nablus "to strike at terrorists," deploying soldiers, snipers military vehicles, tanks, and bulldozers. In the view of a radio journalist from Nablus, the purpose of this siege of the city was to turn attention away from Israel's construction of its "Wall" across the West Bank, its policy of strangulation.. The true aim of this stranglehold, as John Berger has phrased it, is the destruction of the Palestinians' sense of temporal and spatial continuity so that they leave the country or become indentured servants.

As a result of the 1967 war Israel, by occupying the West Bank ,the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights, tripled the territory under its control. Military and government considered the pre–1967 borders , the Green Line drawn in the cease–fire agreements of 1949 and recognized as an international border, "indefensible"; Abba Eban called it "the Auschwitz line", In their euphoria of victory, the Israelis claimed that the West Bank and Gaza were "disputed territories" which had never been under the control of a sovereign state, and that they were now occupied legally, for reasons of self–defense and until permanent borders could be determined by final peace agreements.

Since 1967 Israel ,considering the borders between the state and the occupied Palestinian territories fluid and elastic, has incorporated an increasing number of settlements. (Since 2002 when A. Sharon was elected, 56 officially recognized settlements have been added to the previous 145 settlements., a total population of some 400,000 settlers , including the Jewish neighborhoods created in East Jerusalem). At the same time many factors encouraging creeping agoraphobia among Israelis––––demographic expansion of the Palestinian population in the territories, insurrections, terrorism, international pressure, economics and public opinion ––– have made the existence of a Palestinian state inevitable. The Israeli government is determined to determine the form and nature of that inevitable state..

Most Israelis want a physical separation from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Over the past year their government has set about establishing that separation unilaterally by the construction of a serpentine course of fences, barriers, walls. A new, effective border, not the Green Line, but a "seam line" is being drawn and constructed. It includes the unilateral annexation of 6% of the land of the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority sees this as a policy of Bantustanisation, the creation of isolated cantons instead of the viable state which has long been promised.

For the Haaretz correspondent D. Rubenstein these constructions are becoming a "wall of strangulation". Over 350 kilometers of barriers are projected at an estimated cost of two million dollars per km; one–third, the northern section, has been completed.already, and the rest is planned for by the end of 2005. According to a UN report these constructions will isolate some 274,000 Palestinians in small enclaves. An additional 400,000 will find themselves west of the wall with restricted access to their agricultural land, jobs, schools, hospitals.

The last phase of the Sharon plan for separation will be the "Eastern Barrier", a projected wall of 700 kilometers. In effect then, the Palestinian state and its population will have no contact with the outside world that is not under Israel's control.

Last winter, I attended a conference on Oral History at Birzeit University in the occupied Palestinian territory. The hotel I stayed in in Ramallah was about ten kilometers from the university normally a fifteen minute drive away. However since Intifadah II, the Israeli army has separated the two towns by placing a substantial mound of earth along the road making it impossible for vehicles to pass. Students and teachers and whoever else wants to go from one side to the other must leave their car, taxi or bus, climb over the mound and then find a ride in a taxi or bus to their destination. Usually, there is a checkpoint at the mound and documents have to be presented to the Israeli military to be allowed to pass. Hours may be spent crossing these ten kilometers. The occupation has made time and space uncertain, unpredictable.

The scene of the crossing viewed from afar looked like nothing so much as a massive movement of refugees in a war zone; one can easily understand the fear of Palestinians that the Israelis want by such practices to humiliate them and to expel them from the land.

On the second day of the conference the Israeli soldiers were not at the checkpoint, and the mound of earth had been partly cleared away by Palestinians so that some vehiclescould pass through. Nonetheless, outside the entrance to the university, Israeli troops had appeared , lined up about 30 students and were agressively checking their identity papers. Another form of harassment. By the next day, the mound of earth had reappeared, been reconstructed by Israeli tractors during the night.

When we left the university at the end of the day, one of our hosts offered me a ride back to Ramallah. He wanted to show me the 'scenic' route, 30 kilometers over back roads to circumvent mounds and checkpoints. Unfortunately, we had an accident, a collision with a mini-bus in which several people were injured and needed hospital care.

First to arrive at the scene was an Israeli command car. Several boyish–looking soldiers approached , aiming their machine guns at us, and wanting to know what was going on. They seemed frightened and confused, victors fearing the defeated Luckily we managed to calm them, to convince them that it was only an accident. They cursed us and drove off. Eventually, a Palestinian ambulance arrived and managed to transport the injured to hospital.

Such absurd situations are 'normal' and indeed undramatic in the occupied territories of Palestine. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), there are 65 staffed checkpoints in the West Bank of which only nine separate it from Israel ; the rest control traffic between West Bank communities. There are 607 physical roadblocks preventing passage of vehicles---457 mounds of dirt, 94 concrete blocks, 50 trenches. The name of the game is fragmentation.

Israel rejected the Court's authority on the issue and justifies the barrier in terms of its needs for security. The government's assessment of the U.S. position, the only one that counts for it, is that the Americans understand Israel's security needs and accept the construction and the route of the barrier. Nonetheless, Washington rejects Sharon's idea of an "Eastern Barrier" which it sees as a means to annex the Jordan Valley and the ridges dominating it in order to close the Palestinians into a holding pen. At the end of the day, however, the Israelis find encouragement in the lack of enthusiasm in the U.S. for respecting or strengthening international institutions.

---
Kenneth Brown, Emeritus professor of Sociology, University of Manchester (U.K.), Director of the review Mediterraneans, Paris, France: medit a t msh-paris d o t fr .

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Washington Post Weblog Contest

The Washington Post is running a contest for the best weblogs on politics this fall, including international politics. They are now taking nominations and will then do voting online. Another sign that blogging has arrived. I hope the Blogistan community will take the time to make its preferences known, now that big media is inquiring.
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Democratic Convention Will not Denounce Iraq War

Stewart Powell of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that there won't be much difference between the policies on Iraq to be adopted by the delegates of the Democratic National Convention and those already pursued by the Bush administration. Powell writes:

Delegates at the Democratic National Convention are expected tomorrow night to approve an Iraq policy that's hardly distinguishable from the course that the Bush administration is now pursuing.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, chairman of the convention, insisted there would be no fights inside the hall over the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

"The ... Iraq section, was adopted with strong language on multilateralism, respecting alliances, having an exit strategy," Richardson told reporters, summing up the bland approach that the platform adopts on the war.

Democratic platform writers purposely left out any specific timetable for the withdrawal of American forces.

The platform language stands in sharp contrast to the anti-war viewpoints of many rank-and-file Democrats.

A New York Times/CBS News poll earlier this month showed 72 percent of Democrats believe the United States should never have invaded Iraq.

Party leaders appear hopeful of attracting centrists and independents by sidestepping a strong anti-war plank. That leaves liberal Democrats attending the convention in the position of having to bite their tongues over Iraq.

I fear this realism is warranted. If John Kerry wins, he will inherit the Iraq morass and will not have good options there. He can't just pull out the troops and leave oil-rich Persian Gulf to fall into chaos. The idea that the international community can be persuaded to come in and rescue us seems far-fetched. We'll just have to muddle through. This outcome is a kind of poison pill bequeathed all Americans by the jingoist party in Washington (both so-called realists and neoconservatives). We broke it, we own it, as Powell warned (threatened) Bush.

[I have gotten several complaints about this paragraph from readers who dream of a different Iraq policy. Believe me I wish I could see an alternative. But if the US troops withdrew tomorrow, I'd give Allawi and his "government" about two weeks to live, after which the Deluge. And the Deluge really would endanger US energy security (say, $10 a gallon gasoline, which equals de-industrialization, if the Persian Gulf region were destabilized) and possibly open us to further terrorist attacks, with a disheveled Iraq as a base. And France, Russia, Germany, India, etc. are not coming, folks. There are no "international troops" to replace US ones. Even if it were inclined, which it is not, the EU only has a spare capacity of 12,500 troops for service abroad, given its commitments in the Balkans and Afghanistan.

The only way for the US and UK and other foreign troops to get out of Iraq is for an Iraqi army to be reestablished pronto. The only way to do that pronto is essentially to bring back the Baath army. I'd say bringing back the non-dirty Baath regular army may be the best near-term solution, if the politics of it can be resolved; it isn't happening with any rapidity. Allawi may be trying to do that, but remember that the Kurds and the Sadrist Shiites won't exactly be elated, and the country could break up over it. To repeat, this is not Bush's mess. This is America's mess. It is not going away, there are no good options, and it may go terribly wrong on Kerry if he is elected. It is not my job to give you good news or make you feel better about the future. My American readers may as well understand that their country is caught in quicksand in Iraq and Afghanistan, and nobody is there to throw us a rope. - addendum 2:09 pm 7/26]

The most wideranging statement I have seen by the Kerry-Edwards campaign on security issues is "Defeating Global Terrorism." These are the main points:

# Directing Military Action to Destroy and Disrupt Terrorist Networks. Under John Kerry’s leadership, American military operations will be precise and deadly.

# Keeping Weapons of Mass Destruction Out of Terrorist Hands. John Kerry and John Edwards will launch a new initiative to prevent the world's deadliest weapons from falling into the world's most dangerous hands. They have a plan to secure vulnerable bomb-making materials, prevent the production of new materials for nuclear weapons, and work to end nuclear weapons programs in hostile states like North Korea and Iran.

# Strengthening America’s Intelligence Capabilities. John Kerry and John Edwards will restore the credibility of our intelligence community, strengthen accountability and leadership by creating a true Director of National Intelligence, maximize coordination and integration of resources and information, and transform our intelligence services to deal with today’s threats.

# Leading Relentless Efforts to Shut Down the Flow of Terrorist Funds. America will crack down on nations or banks that fail to act against money laundering by strengthening our anti-money laundering laws and imposing tough financial sanctions against violators.

# Preventing New Terrorist Havens. John Kerry and John Edwards will work with our allies and the international community to stabilize and secure Iraq and Afghanistan to ensure that these newly freed nations and other weak states around the world do not become havens for terrorists.

# Preventing Recruitment of New Terrorists. John Kerry and John Edwards will work to win the war of ideas and the future of a young generation with a strategy to break down economic and cultural isolation in Arab and Muslim countries and support local efforts to promote democracy, trade, tolerance, and respect for human rights. The strategy includes a major initiative in public diplomacy and an international effort to improve education.

The most important of these points in my view is the last. So far I haven't seen anything worthy of the name being done with regard to public diplomacy by the Bush administration. They tried some slick ads, which failed miserably since they did not address the US policies to which most Muslims object. I think the Democrats should promise to bring back an independent United States Information Agency, with all its libraries and programs. The UK's British Council and Germany's Goethe Institute are both far more extensive and impressive than US public diplomacy efforts at the moment. That idiot Jesse Helms destroyed the USIA and inflicted enormous harm on the US as a result. We need to bring it back to get the word out in the Muslim world about the good aspects of the U.S. (we do have some). Do you know that almost no one in the Middle East gives the US any credit for intervening to help the Bosnian Muslims and for saving the Kosovars from Milosevic? Is there even a book on the subject in Arabic? Why is the US government so clueless about communicating itself to publics outside the US? Doesn't anyone realize that this cluelessness endangers us all?

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Heavy Fighting at Buhriz Kills 15

Paul Garwood of AP reports that "the carnage" continued in Iraq over the weekend.

US troops made a sweep of Buhriz, northeast of Baghdad near Baqubah, which is a radical Salafi ("Sunni fundamentalist") stronghold, which has mounted numerous rebellions in recent months. Its nearby date palm groves were suspected of affording cover to guerrillas.

The US soldiers were supported by Iraqi National Guard troops, who came into direct conflict with guerrillas in the southern part of the city. The US gave air support to the Iraqi National Guards, levelling at least one building. The firefight lasted 5 hours, and left 15 Iraqis (guerrillas?) dead, with no US or Iraqi National Guard casualties. (The latter statistic suggests to me that the deaths were probably mainly the result of firing by US artillery, helicopter gunships and US fighter jets. If the Iraqi National Guard had advanced into the city and engaged in close combat with the guerrillas, it seems a little unlikely that they would have been entirely unscathed.

The BBC showed footage of the fighting, and the guerrillas looked to me as though they were imitating Saudi dress.

Other violence:

Assistant Deputy Minister of the Interior Col. Aidan Khalid Qadir was attacked in al-Hillah on Sunday but narrowly escaped assassination. Guerrillas killed two of his bodyguards. (az-Zaman).

Guerrillas killed five persons in Kirkuk.

Someone assassinated a former Baath district head, Brig. Khaled Dawoud, in Baghdad. His son was also killed in the drive-by shooting. (This assassination was unlikely to be the work of insurgents-- more likely it is a revenge killing by Dawoud's victims).

A roadside bomb killed a US soldier near Beiji and injured another.

The various hostage crises continued, with two Pakistanis having been added to the list of those held.

Some in the US military are arguing that US troops should adopt a less visible posture in Iraq, since their presence (and home invasions) provokes a good deal of the violence in the country. If it is militarily possible to get the US military out of sight except when being actively deployed to face guerrillas, that would be an excellent idea. The question is whether the Iraqi National Guards are up to substituting for them on routine patrols, etc.




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200,000 Israeli Fascists Demand Colonization of Gaza

Tens of thousands of rightwing Israeli imperialists formed a human chain aimed at stretching between Jerusalem and Gaza to protest plans of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to withdraw Israeli colonists from Gaza.

Let's just talk a little bit about Gaza. The Palestinians are largely descendants of people who have lived there for literally thousands of years. Male Palestinians and male Jews are very closely related according to DNA research. Gaza was not given to Israel by the United Nations in the 1948 partition, and it was never a site of significant Jewish population. It was conquered by Israel in the 1967 war, but the United Nations charter forbids the acquisition of territory by military force. This is a place where hundreds of thousands of people face severe poverty and even hunger, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Palestinians in general are facing unprecedented poverty and malnutrition, including the children. So this is the place you choose to insert 7500 Israeli colonizers? While we are at it, why not steal some land from starving Ethiopians and colonize Ethiopia (oops, that was the 1930s)? I mean, it is one thing to lack compassion for people who are suffering. It is another to want to kick them while they are down.

The justifications given by the fascist protesters in Israel for colonizing Gaza included the conviction that God had given them the Palestinians' land, that Palestinians did not educate their children to want "peace" (i.e. to accept being stolen from?), and that failing to colonize Gaza would somehow endanger Israel itself (hunh?).

Of course I am being provocative in calling the protesters fascists. Fascism, unlike other mass ideologies such as Communism, is not easily defined (and for definitional purposes it is better to look at Spain, Italy and Japan in the 1930s rather than Germany, whose ideology was in many ways peculiar and the scale of whose atrocities, including the Holocaust, make almost all comparisons invidious). The Likud Party is deeply influenced by the thought of Zeev Jabotinsky, a Zionist extremist deeply influenced by 1930s fascism. Fascism remains a useful analytical tool for understanding modern politics. Each country's fascism has been different, since fascism is more a style than a specific ideology. Among its attributes is

1) Radical nationalism. Fascism celebrates a cult of the nation, seeing it as the ultimate human value, trumping all others. Thus, one may lie, cheat, steal, spy and murder for the nation without shame.

2) Militarism and aggressiveness. Fascist political movements are expansionist, dissatisfied with their national boundaries and seeking to colonize the territory of neighbors. Thus, Franco got his start by oppressing Muslims in the Rif and Ceuta, Spanish Morocco. Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. Japan annexed Korea and much of China.

3) Racism. Fascist movements, because of their extreme nationalism, tend to demonize ethnic groups considered outside the nation. Racism becomes a justification for violence, since groups of people are defined as essentially demonic or threatening, and therefore deserving of being repressed in order to prevent them from doing evil. Milosevic justified his killing of Bosnians on the grounds that they were disloyal to the Serbian nation and easily seduced by Muslim fundamentalism. (Before Milosevic attacked them, Bosnian Muslims were the most secular in the world).

4) Favoring the wealthy, punishing the poor. Franco put down miners in Asturia and the workers of industrially advanced Barcelona. Mussolini drove Italian peasants further into poverty. Both favored wealthy elites with their policies. They despised the poor and drove them deeper into poverty. In all the territory dominated by Israel, the poorest subjects are the Palestinians, who have been made dirt poor by Israeli policies.

5) Dictatorship. Fascists disliked open democratic elections. Here the Likud fascists depart from the profile, but only slightly. Although they participate in elections in Jewish-majority Israel, they do not want Palestinians to have independence. They have long favored Israeli military rule, which is to say, dictatorship, over the Palestinian population. That is, over 9 million people live under Israeli rule, but only somewhate over 6 million of them get to engage in democratic self-governing (fewer if one considers how many obstacles have been placed in the way of democratic participation by Arab Israelis). The Oslo process would have given Palestinians a democratic nation of their own; the Likud Party and its American acolytes conspired to keep the Palestinians from ever having that status, which has meant more years of living under Israeli military rule, not significantly different from Ceuta under Franco.

No American media will report the demonstrations in Israel as fascist in nature, and no American politicians will dare criticize the Likud. But the fact is that the Israeli predations in the West Bank and Gaza are a key source of rage in the Muslim world against the United States (which toadies unbearably to whatever garbage comes out of Tel Aviv's political establishment), something that the 9/11 commission report stupidly denies. If the United States is hit again, as seems likely, the fascist Likud demonstrators will be in the chain of causality. If their cause were just, the US should stand with them and risk taking the hit. But although the cause of Israel's own peace and security is just, the cause of colonizing Gaza and the West Bank is fascist. That shouldn't be defended by the US, and the loss of even one American life in defense of Israeli aggression and expansionism is intolerable.

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Sadrists Boycott National Congress
As US Troops Surround Muqtada's House

Az-Zaman is reporting that US troops surrounded Muqtada al-Sadr's house on Sunday for several hours before withdrawing. It was not known if he was in the house. He had come out of hiding to deliver the Friday prayers sermon in Kufa this weekend. He delivered a blistering attack on the US occupation forces and on the caretaker government of Iyad Allawi.
The US has been trying to arrest or kill him since early April, but the government of PM Iyad Allawi had seemed to seek some accommodation, allowing his newspaper, al-Hawzah al-Natiqah, to reopen after the Americans had closed it. The American siege of Muqtada's home on Sunday seems a reversal of the new policy. (I take the al-Zaman report with something of a grain of salt until I see other corroboration).

Muqtada al-Sadr and his radical Shiite followers boycotted elections on Sunday that prepared the way for a national congress. On Sunday, Iraqis began choosing 1000 delegates to the national congress, which will in turn elect 80 out of 100 members of a National Assembly. This largely ceremonial body will have veto over some decisions of Iraqi prime minister Iyad Allawi, but is not empowered to make new laws or to repeal the laws passed by fiat by US viceroy Paul Bremer before June 30, 2004. According to AP, Sadrist spokesman Ali al-Yasseri said, ``We originally supported the idea, and agreed to take part because we know in the rest of the world, such an assembly would be considered the nation's parliament . . . But this assembly will have no legislative authority. ... This body will have no powers. We see this as a trick on the Iraqi people. It's a sad joke." The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution In Iraq, a Shiite rival of the Sadrists, were also critical of the national assembly elections.

The elections Sunday were generally problematic, according to James Tarabay of AP. Basra, Kut and Kirkuk were having trouble electing their delegates because of factional disputes. There were also questions about how fair the election process was. As with all the elections so far held in Iraq since the US occupation began, they are not one person, one vote elections but rather some complicated expression of consensus by handpicked notables.

Robin Wright of the Washington Post explains: "The selection process, which began last week, used a complicated formula to come up with 548 delegates from Iraq's 18 provinces, including 130 from Baghdad; 140 from political parties; 70 tribal leaders; 170 intellectuals and prominent Iraqi figures; and 100 from the preparatory committee . . ."

The selection process has exercerbated ethnic conflict and inter-party disputes. The site of the 3-day national congress is being kept secret for fear it will be targeted by the resistance to the US occupation and its Iraqi allies.

Muqtada's group is a major one, and the decision to boycott the national congress is a blow to the legitimacy of the process. He made headlines this weekend by forcefully condemning the beheading of foreign hostages, a practice he said was contrary to Islamic law.

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9/11 Commission report in HTML

Thanks to Jason Kottke's Documents Page for making the 9/11 commission report available in html, which I find generally easier to use than pdf.

Ooops. That was only the executive summary. The whole thing is at Vivisimo.

and

PDF Hacks.


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Black Banners and Economic Warfare in Iraq

Claude Salhani of UPI reports that the recent kidnappings of truck drivers in a bid to force the companies that employ them out of the Iraq market are being claimed by a shadowy group called "the Black Banners." He speculates that this phrase has a Shiite ring to it, but quotes one observer who doubts that. Salhani writes:

The "war" in Iraq is suddenly taking a very different turn, and regrettably, not one for the better. After first targeting the military, then changing tactics by kidnapping hostages and holding them in exchange for the withdrawal of Coalition troops -- and one may add with some success -- the "insurgents" are now going after the soft underbelly of Iraq, its fragile economy.

A new rebel group, hitherto unknown, calling themselves the "Black Banners" is the latest to surface. They join the plethora of armed groups opposed to the presence of foreign forces, particularly American soldiers, in Iraq. The Black Banners have detained six hostages: three Indians, two Kenyans and an Egyptian, all nationals from "neutral" nations.

The tactic of attacking the civilian employees of companies doing work in Iraq is actually not new, and is only one of a number of current guerrilla tactics. Another is to assassinate municipal, provincial and federal officials. A significant percentage of municipal council members has been assassinated, though only The Guardian has reported on this deadly campaign at the local level.

As for the trucker kidnappings, the Black Banners are a symbol of revolution in Islamic history, and not only among Shiites. The corrupt Umayyad kingdom was overthrown by the Abbasids around 750 CE when revolutionaries raised black banners in the East. The Abbasid dynasty, which created Baghdad and ruled for centuries, is seen by Iraqis generally and by Muslims generally, including Sunnis, to have created a Golden Age when the Muslim world was more glorious than Europe. So the term "Black Banners" could have a Shiite implication, but does not necessarily do so. Even secularists or Marxists could adopt black banners as a revolutionary symbol, with reference to the Abbasid revolution.

The tactic of economic warfare aimed at multinationals and at their workers, drawn from the global market, is working at an official level. The Philippines has withdrawn from Iraq and has called for Filipinos not to work there (it is a major source of guest workers throughout the world, several million, and they are a political force, which helps explain the government's solicitude for them). Now Kenya has asked it citizens not to work in Iraq. But every indication is that both in the US and elsewhere, workers eager to participate in the Iraq bonanza and make a lot of money are still heading for Iraq. Certainly, Filipinos are. Unfortunately, some of these guestworkers are likely to fall victim to the spiral of violence in Iraq.

What does seem clear is that Donald Rumsfeld's peculiar idea that Iraq is "calming down" is ridiculous on the face of it.

Two US soldiers were killed in Samarra on Thursday by a roadside bomb, and there was more fighting in Fallujah on Friday, and sundry other violence.

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Guest Editorial: Penn on the Fall of Pacifist Japan

Michael Penn examines the impact of the Iraq crisis on Japan.

Ending the “Irresponsible Peace”—The Fall of Pacifist Japan

by Michael Penn

More than two centuries ago James Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers that “the mild voice of reason, pleading the cause of an enlarged and permanent interest, is but too often drowned, before public bodies as well as individuals, by the clamors of an impatient avidity for immediate and immoderate gain.” To put it in less-poetic modern language: In politics, short-term interests often win out over long-term interests. These are thoughts that are brought to mind by the recent turn in Japanese foreign policy, and by the forces in Washington that have so assiduously promoted this change.

In the immediate aftermath of the Pacific War, the Supreme Command of the Allied Powers (SCAP) was determined to ensure not only that Japan was really defeated, but that it would never rise again as an aggressive military power to challenge the American-dominated order in the Pacific. One of the main instruments that SCAP used to enforce its policy was Japan’s “Peace Constitution.” The Preface of the Constitution noted that the Japanese people were “resolved that never again shall we be visited with the horrors of war through the action of government.” The crucial Article Nine of the Constitution continued on as follows:

1) Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.

2) In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.

However, with the onset of the Cold War, the priorities of the U.S. government began to change, and the Eisenhower Administration began to pressure the newly-sovereign Japanese government to take more “responsibility” for Japan’s own military defense. As a result, in 1954 the “Self-Defense Forces” (SDF) were created to help fulfill the perceived need for the defense of the Japanese home islands.

For decades afterwards, Japan’s opposition parties argued convincingly that the very existence of the SDF was a violation of the Constitution. However, as a practical matter the SDF received public acceptance so long as the “spirit” of the Constitution was maintained. The SDF was kept at home and kept quiet. Throughout the Cold War, Japan maintained an uneasy equilibrium between the actual text of the Constitution and its general intent by pretending not to notice that the SDF was really there.

It was the Persian Gulf Crisis of 1990-1991 that upset the equilibrium. At that time, the first President Bush was eager to assemble as broad a coalition as possible to challenge the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Japan responded quickly with sanctions and its traditional offers of financial support, but soon found itself reeling under a barrage of American criticism for engaging in “checkbook diplomacy” and avoiding the “dirty work” of military action. Major U.S. newspapers like the New York Times assaulted Japan’s dilatory performance and Congress even made open threats aimed at Tokyo. Japanese elites were stung deeply by this kind of criticism, but their hands were tied by the constitutional restrictions and by the fact that a large majority of the Japanese public was simply opposed to any major expansion of Japan’s military role. In the end, Japan paid about US$13 billion and sent minesweepers to the postwar Persian Gulf.

The Japanese government’s reaction to September 11 has stood in sharp contrast to that of the Persian Gulf War. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is far more popular and politically secure than Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu, his Gulf War predecessor. He is also among the most determined of Japan’s leaders to restore the full legality and acceptance of Japan’s military service. His appointee as head of the Defense Agency was the rightwing military buff Shigeru Ishiba. Furthermore, his main foreign policy advisor on Iraq policy has been, until recently, Yukio Okamoto, a strong proponent of strengthening the U.S.-Japan alliance and establishing “responsible pacifism” (which is far more concerned with “responsibility” than “pacifism”).

Many commentators from the American political establishment have heaped praise upon Koizumi for his more active role, and this, together with the North Korea issue, have helped Japan’s Right stage a remarkable rise in political influence. It is now open season on the postwar pacifist tradition in Japan as all the old red lines are being crossed one-by-one. First, the MSDF was allowed to send Aegis warships to support U.S. operations in Afghanistan. Next, Japan actively lobbied on the Bush Administration’s behalf to support the “preemptive” invasion of Iraq. Then, Japan actually sent its own SDF units to Samawa for the purpose of “humanitarian reconstruction support.” Now, Japan’s main business lobby has just asked permission to begin arms export sales abroad.

The fact that all of this is clearly contrary to Japan’s Constitution has been waived aside by the government as a matter of little importance (The official line is that there are “other ways” to interpret the Constitution). The fact that about 80% of the Japanese public opposed the American attack on Iraq at the time it began was also irrelevant. The salient point is that the government forced it through and thus made it a reality. As this new reality has set in, the Japanese public has been showing an increasing acceptance of the new status quo.

The Bush Administration and the Japanese Right have thus succeeded in bringing about a sea change in Japanese politics. Japan’s age of “irresponsible pacifism” and avoiding the “dirty work” of war is clearly at an end. However, before U.S. leaders uncork the champagne, there are yet a few unsavory points to take into account:

1) Japan has been effectively ruled by a single right-leaning political party for almost half a century with only one short lapse in the early 1990s. In other words, Japan is not a very mature democratic country in spite of its free elections.

2) Real power in Japan tends to lie with a bureaucracy that is not accountable to the public and tends in fact to operate above the law. The infrastructure of a genuine civil society remains weak in Japan.

3) The SDF is already showing signs of discomfort with civilian political control. In late 2001, Japanese officers secretly asked the Pentagon to pressure their own government to allow them to send Aegis warships to the Indian Ocean. Also, Admiral Koichi Furusho in early June 2004 requested that the new position of Joint Chief of Staff not be under the authority of any civilian in the Defense Agency. The Constitution hasn’t even been revised yet and already the old military-civilian conflict that plagued prewar Japan is beginning to reappear.

In his recent book on Japan’s destruction of its own natural environment, Alex Kerr, a lifelong resident of Japan, made an interesting observation about the workings of Japanese government and society. He noted that “many an admiring book tells of how subtle [Japanese] bureaucrats gently guide the nation, magically avoiding all the discord and market chaos that afflict the West. But while the experts marveled at how efficiently the well-oiled engines were turning, the ship was headed toward the rocks. Japan’s cleverly crafted machine of governance lacks one critically important part: brakes. Once it has been set on a particular path, Japan tends to continue on that path until it reaches excesses that would be unthinkable in most other nations.”

The Bush Administration—in alliance with the re-born Japanese Right—has now helped Japan shed its excesses of peace. If Kerr’s analysis of Japan is correct, then what Japanese excesses are waiting for us now in this age of an eternal “War on Terror”? When future generations of Americans look back upon what has been done in these days—to abuse and castigate the Japanese for being too peaceful until they finally began to accept the “responsibility” of war once again—will they say that we have “plead the cause of an enlarged and permanent interest” (that is, a happy and peaceful Japan), or that we have forsaken our own long-term interests in favor of “an impatient avidity for immediate and immoderate gain”? As Madison may have said: Let Reason be the Judge.


Michael Penn
The University of Kitakyushu
mep1071 a t hotmail d o t com

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