Informed Comment

Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion

Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute

Saturday, February 28, 2009

Obama: US does not Seek Permanent Bases in Afghanistan

President Obama said on Friday that the US has no long-term goal of keeping US troops in Afghanistan. (See below).

In contrast to Obama's pronouncements on getting out of Iraq, he has not announced a timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan. (The full text of Obama's remarks on the withdrawal from Iraq is here.)

Meanwhile, the Afghan Interior Minister estimated Friday that there are 10,000 to 15,000 Taliban guerrillas active across 17 provinces. (This is a big increase from a couple of years ago, when the estimates were 3,000 - 5,000).

Afghan president Hamid Karzai may call snap elections for April, rather than waiting until August.

Aljazeera English reports on a demonstration in Ghazni Province against the US and NATO. The crowd say they were upset about a NATO bombing of a mosque. The USG denies that there were GIs operating in that area:




Wikileaks discovered that the password for several pages on how to finesse reporters regarding Afghanistan at the Pentagon web site was "progress." What a weak password. Anyway, they posted the documents, which give some insight into how the Department of Defense hopes to influence the public on the Afghanistan War.

Brave New Films is launching a new film on Afghanistan that asks what exactly the US's objectives there are:



Obama's interview with Jim Lehrer on the planned Iraq pullout and other issues is here:

Clip 1 (Iraq):



and here:

Clip 2 (Challenges):




End/ (Not Continued)

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Submit to RedditSubmit to SlashdotStumble Upon Toolbar
Email to a Friend:

Friday, February 27, 2009

The End of the War of Images on the American Public

The Defense Department has reversed the Bush administration's ban on photographs of returning coffins of US military personnel killed in war abroad.

Apparently a lot of the families of fallen warriors liked the ban. Future such families will be able to keep it in place for their loved ones if they so choose.

But everyone should be clear that the Bush administration did not impose the ban for the sake of the families. It was a cynical move intended to disguise from the American people the cost of the Bush elective war in Iraq. And, despite the administration's occasional inability to control the visual record, it largely worked.

The American public saw a sanitized Iraq war, certainly compared to what was visible on Arab satellite television. We seldom saw the wounded or dead in Iraq (typically if US televison showed us the aftermath of a market bombing, it would just be the crater and some burning cars; it doesn't look like that). We almost never see an injured veteran on television, even though nearly 40,000 GIs were wounded badly enough to go to hospital.

The Bush administration set some of the rules, the US corporate media set others. The effect was to mask for many years from the US public the sheer horror of what happened there. Former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld repeatedly stood before the camera and told baldfaced lies. There was no looting. There was no guerrilla war. There was no civil war. Some people read Orwell's 1984 in high school and take it as a horrific warning of what could happen. Some apparently rather like what they see and take it as their how-to manual. Even to this day, unrealistically low figures are quoted for those Iraqis who died as a direct or indirect result of the 2003 US invasion, and more realistic projections by public health specialists are routinely rejected by the press.

The war dead belong in the first instance to their families, and it is right that their wishes will be respected. But they also do belong to the Republic, and we need to be able both to commemorate their sacrifice for the nation and also to gauge the degree of sacrifice the nation is making for an enterprise. The sleazy liars and propagandists of the previous administration wanted us to remain ignorant of those costs, wanted us to remain child-like and ignorant.

Indeed, the artificial separation of the war costs from the regular budget replicated in the arena of public finance the hiding of the bodies of the dead from the photographers. It even often fooled seasoned journalists, who gave budget deficit figures in the Bush years that ignored the expenditure of treasure on Iraq!

Now the wars will go in the regular budget, as they should have all along, so that the lazy are not so easily fooled. The whole Bush administration was a massive Madoff-like Ponzi scheme, made possible only because no one bothered to audit the books.

The new administration will need to be audited, too, of course. That is what a Republic is. But at least they are signaling that they won't stand in the way of the audit, and, indeed, will work toward transparency to help the public carry it out. Now that is a revolution.

End/ (Not Continued)


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Submit to RedditSubmit to SlashdotStumble Upon Toolbar
Email to a Friend:

Negotiations in Afghanistan?
Iran, Hikmatyar said to Be in Play

Even as President Obama sends 17,000 extra US troops to Afghanistan and intends to spend $140 bn on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in 2009, rumors of negotiations with Taliban elements keep surfacing.

The Dari Persian Afghan newspaper Chiragh editorialized on February 23, 2009, on the possibility that cooperation against the Taliban might prove grounds for an improvement in Iran-American relations (USG Open Source Translation ):


' Over recent days, high ranking authorities in Iran and America have arrived in Kabul one after the other to visit Afghan government authorities. (Passage omitted: visits by Iranian First Vice-President Parviz Davudi, US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi)

Now, the terrorism concern is not only threatening Afghanistan, it has also created joint concerns for the authorities of America and Iran. The three countries are concerned about the Taleban reorganizing and reinforcing in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

With no doubt, we can say that, despite the confrontation of America and Iran's interests in the world, both countries have been trying to establish security in Afghanistan over the past seven years and they have indirectly invested in the same project.

However, with the new reshuffles in the US cabinet the confrontation between America and Iran slowly turning into an equation, the current concern, like the Taleban and other terrorist factions reorganizing, is a pretext that has been created as an opportunity for America and Iran to correct their relations using Afghanistan.

Kabul has been regarded as a threat to the regional countries before, but now the political players in Iran and America have selected Afghanistan as a focus of their peace and coordination.

Understanding the value of the time and opportunity will lead the leaders of Afghanistan to follow a practical strategy, to use a chance before it is terminated. '


Aljazeera English gives an exclusive report on the British role behind the scenes in kickstarting negotiations between Gulbadin Hikmatyar of the Hizb-i Islami and the Karzai government. Apparently the hope is that Hikmatyar would go into exile in Saudi Arabia for a while and then ultimately receive amnesty and return to Afghanistan.



What we now call the "Taliban" are actually 5 distinct groups and movements: 1) The Old Taliban of Mulla Omar, now based in Quetta, Pakistan; 2) the Hizb-i Islami [Islamic Party] of former prime minister and warlord, Gulbadin Hikmatyar; 3) the followers of warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani; 4) the Taliban Movement of Pakistan in that country's tribal agencies; and 5) disgruntled Pushtun villagers who object to foreign troops on their soil or whose poppy crops were forcibly eradicated, leaving them destitute. Hikmatyar and Haqqani at one time or another were opposed to the Old Taliban, but have now allied with them. According to the Pajhwok News Network, a joint US and Afghan patrol targeted a militant of the Haqqani group near Khost on Thursday, capturing 6 militants and some light arms.

Some speculate that the alleged British negotiations with Hikmatyar may be aimed at detaching the Hizb-i Islami from its current Taliban allies.

While the Hikmatyar talks may prove fruitful if they are as Aljazeera represents them, other negotiations may not work out. Elements of the "Old Taliban" of Mulla Omar based in Quetta seem to be willing to talk with the government of Hamid Karzai, though they insist that the withdrawal of US and NATO troops is the precondition for social peace in that country. They also insist that post-American Afghanistan be ruled by their rigid interpretation of Islamic law and be completely independent of the US. In other words, their demands are so maximal that it is hard to see how they can produce meaningful compromise.

Meanwhile, the British government has admitted turning over two persons captured in Iraq to the US, which transported them to the Bagram base in Afghanistan, where they were likely put under severe duress.


End/ (Not Continued)


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Submit to RedditSubmit to SlashdotStumble Upon Toolbar
Email to a Friend:

Thursday, February 26, 2009

5 Troops Killed in Afghanistan;
US in Jalrez Valley

A US soldier from Wisconsin was announced killed in Afghanistan on Wednesday (he died on Tuesday).

Three British soldiers were killed Wednesday by a roadside bomb in the southern Pushtun Helmand Province, and another died in hospital from wounds earlier received in Helman. The death bring the toll among the multi-national forces since Friday to 11. Last Friday, guerrillas killed 3 US soldiers in Uruzgan Province with a roadside bomb.

Thom Shanker notes:

'the Joint IED Defeat Organization, tallied 3,611 incidents of improvised explosives in Afghanistan in 2008, a 50 percent increase from 2007. The number of U.S. and allied deaths from roadside bombs more than doubled, to 176 in 2008 from 75 in 2007. Even more Afghan civilians were killed.

In Iraq, there were more than 9,000 IED attacks last year, but that was far below 2006, when they reached 2,500 a month. Today, insurgents in Iraq are planting fewer IEDs, and only one in nine produces an American casualty.

In Afghanistan, where as many as one in three bombs kills or wounds someone, American officers say they hope a combination of technology, intelligence, armor and training can help them drive down the casualty rate.'


The British are involved in a 'bizarre mini-civil war' insofar as some of the guerrillas being fought by the British army are UK citizens who speak with "west Midlands" accents. The British Muslim community is extremely upset about the British military role in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are about a million and a half Muslims in the UK, in a population of about 61 million.

200 US troops and 200 Afghan troops (along with their French trainers) pushed into the Jalrez Valley south of the capital of Kabul on Wednesday, seeking Taliban strongholds. They don't appear actually to have found anything, and only succeeded in annoying the local population. Locals did say that their view of the US would improve if Washington spent money on civilian development such as roads.

On Tuesday, some 30 persons died in political violence in Afghanistan.

Erica Gaston, who recently spent a year in Afghanistan, explains that US accidental killing of civilians has created a huge public relations problem.

Uzbekistan will allow NATO to ship non-military supplies for its troops in Afghanistan through Uzbek territory. (The supply chain will start at Lithuania and bring goods by train down to near the Friendship Bridge linking Uzbekistan to Afghanistan). But since the Khyber Pass route in Pakistan is increasingly problematic, I wonder how the US and NATO will ship in the military supplies.

Aljazeera English reports on the diverse groups that are grouped in the US mind under the rubric 'Taliban.'





End/ (Not Continued)


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Submit to RedditSubmit to SlashdotStumble Upon Toolbar
Email to a Friend:

Guest Op-Ed: Israelis Misused Weapons in Gaza to Target Civilians

An informed observer writes in a guest op-ed for IC:

I am troubled by the publication of Uri Dromey’s piece in today’s Guardian.

My reaction to the content is that the piece attempts to blame the victims-- which is a well known sophist technique. As for the misleading explanations of what seems to be the use of legitimate weapons in inappropriate ways and contexts, my reaction can be summarised as "what absolute bollocks!”

The pictures of airburst phosphorous being used to set areas on fire are conclusive evidence of misuse.

Smokescreens use ground burst. If I had ever wanted a smoke point to cover a flanking movement then I wanted the smoke as a dense cloud on the ground at a height that exceeded the height of my people. Armoured Fighting Vehicle also have small smoke dischargers on the turrets and hulls designed to put a cloud of smoke in front of the vehicle to give time to reverse out of danger or to debus and engage the enemy.

Flechettes are used in claymore mines and so called beehive rounds and are used to counter attacks by massed infantry. I had no expectation that the few hundred Hamas fighting men in Gaza would do a human mass Banzai charge against any Israeli unit. That would have achieved the Israeli objective in a few minutes, in a manner similar to Picketts Charge at Gettysburg.

The only mass of humans I could see were the women children and old men taking shelter in schools and hospitals and UN premises.

I would have used claymores to cover the killing zone in any ambush I was planning particularly in jungle ambushes, as they cut through the undergrowth and foliage and kill indiscriminately anyone and anything in the KZ.

Wikipedia gives us a useful introduction to Flechette based weapons:

'Beehive is an anti-personnel round fired from an artillery gun, packed full of metal darts, flechettes, which are ejected from the shell in front of the target by the action of a mechanical time fuze. It is so-called because of the 'buzzing' sound the darts make when flying through the air and in the manner of numerous bees around an actual beehive. It is deadly when used against concentrations of enemy troops due to its shotgun effect in similarity to claymore mines. The beehive round can be considered an evolution of shrapnel artillery ammunition.

The first round actually termed "beehive" was first fired in combat in 1966, to great success,[1] and was thereafter used extensively in the Vietnam War, though the later development of the Killer Junior air burst technique eventually usurped beehive's role. Beehive rounds were extensively used in the Vietnam War, for defence of firebase perimeters against massed enemy attacks, and because it could penetrate the thick canopy of the jungle and "pad"[jargon] it out. The primary beehive round for this purpose was the M546 APERS-T (anti-personnel tracer) shell which projected 8000 flechettes and was direct fired from a near horizontally levelled barrel of a 105mm howitzer[2].'


If this savage assault on the population of Gaza had been planned during the six months of the preceding ceasefire, then whoever selected ammunition loads of flechette weapons must have been planning for a massacre.

The point about Fallujah is misleading. In a manner similar to the evacuation of the women and children from the Alamo, the non combatants in Fallujah were given a week or ten days to leave. Anyone who stayed identified himself as a fighting man.

The unfortunate inhabitants of Gaza had nowhere to escape to because the border crossings were closed. The idea that phone calls warning them to leave buildings was adequate is misleading because it is widely reported by reliable sources that this was used as a weapon of psychological warfare to spread fear and confusion.

I find Amnesty’s report provides enough evidence to convince me that something similar to a Wannsee Protokol may exist somewhere in Tel Aviv and that Senior Israeli officers and politicians have a case to answer at the International Criminal Court. Doubtless I will be accused of anti-semitism for saying it, but I find myself in the company of Sir Gerald Kaufman, Mary Robinson and a glittering array of QCs and eminent jurists in doing so.

I find the Guardian giving this piece of Newspeak a platform without identifying at the end of the piece that the author is closely linked to the Israeli forces worrying.

The Guardian used to be a newspaper that could be relied on to present a point of view that was an antidote to the authoritarian and right wing point of view expressed in newspapers like Daily Telegraph, Times, Jerusalem Post. It is unsettling to find them giving a platform to someone who Professor Avi Schlaim denounces as a propagandist.

If the Independent, whose editorial independence is vouched for by the integrity of Robert Fisk as a correspondent, were to succumb to its financial problems, along with Channel 4 TV-- and The Guardian were to have been subverted we would be left with a biased set of mass media that channel to us Israeli propaganda.

Perhaps the Editor of the Guardian might need to examine his conscience.

End/ (Not Continued)


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Submit to RedditSubmit to SlashdotStumble Upon Toolbar
Email to a Friend:

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Obama to announce 19-month Withdrawal Timetable for Iraq?
4 US Soldiers Wounded

President Obama included this sentence in his State of the Union Address , "I will soon announce a way forward in Iraq that leaves Iraq to its people and responsibly ends this war."

The LAT explains this cryptic reference, based on leaks that suggest that President Obama will announce next week a 19-month timetable for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. He had campaigned on a pledge of getting out within 16 months of his inauguration, but his military commanders had pressed for 23 months. The withdrawal timetable affects two-thirds of US troops now in Iraq, but it is expected that even after 2010 some 50,000 will remain. The Iraqi military continues to need training, and it cannot always handle difficult situations, needing US teams to come in to their aid. Iraq has no air force to speak of. Its newly ordered aircraft will not arrive until 2013 and it will take years to train the pilots. Iraq's military will therefore need US-supplied close air support for years to come, and all the support staff required. The new Iraqi military also does occasionally get into fights it cannot finish, and so rapid response teams remain important.

Although the US military hopes that the Iraqi government won't press the issue, the Status of Forces agreement specifies that all US troops must be out by the end of 2011. The nationalist forces in parliament seem likely to be strengthened in the next election, and I don't expect Iraq to be eager to extend the US mandate. (The Shiite party most explicitly willing to keep US troops in Iraq is the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, which lost badly in the recent provincial elections.)

With the exception of the air force support personnel, the US will likely be asked to get its other troops out in 2011.

There is a lot of speculation out there as to how the US public will react if Obama modifies his campaign pledge of 16 months. Personally, I don't think there is a lot passion out there right now for foreign affairs. People have discounted Iraq as a national project and don't seem invested in it any more, for the most part. They think it was a bad idea. They want out. But I don't think most of them care about the exact timetable for withdrawal, and certainly not whether it is 16 or 19 months. Whether they mind 50,000 troops staying in Iraq in 2011 will surely depend on things like the casualty rate. How unpredictable that is is obvious from the last two days' news (see below).

The security situation remains fragile in Iraq. VOA reports, "The U.S. military says four American soldiers were wounded and an interpreter was killed when gunmen attacked a police station in northern Iraq." VOA adds, "On Monday, the U.S. military said that three American soldiers and an interpreter were killed during combat operations in Iraq's Diyala province north of Baghdad."

A Sunni Arab politician who now stands accused of orchestrating attacks on the Green Zone defended himself on Tuesday, saying he had been targeted by the (Shiite) government because of his (Sunni) political positions.

McClatchy reports political violence for Tuesday.

'Baghdad

Eight people were injured including two national police members when two roadside bombs detonated targeting a patrol of the national police in Palestine Street in east Baghdad.

Nineveh

Three policemen were injured by a roadside bomb that targeted their patrol in Mansour neighborhood in south Mosul on Monday morning.

T[wo] civilians when gunmen threw a grenade targeting the office of the PUK Party in downtown Mosul city

An Iraqi interpreter was killed and other people were injured including US soldiers when two policemen attacked a police station in West Mosul on Tuesday afternoon. US military confirmed the incident.

Kirkuk

Gunmen kidnapped a civilian near a church in downtown Kirkuk city on Monday evening.

A gunman was injured seriously while he was trying to plant a roadside bomb in Hawija town west of Kirkuk city on Monday evening.

Diyala

Three insurgents were killed when clashes broke out between a joint American and Iraqi forces and insurgents in one of the villages of Mandili town east of Baquba early morning.'


End/ (Not Continued)

Cont'd (click below or on "comments")




For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Submit to RedditSubmit to SlashdotStumble Upon Toolbar
Email to a Friend:

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

US To Offer Nearly $1 bn. for Gaza Reconstruction

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will announce at the Gaza donor's conference next week that the US will give $900 million to help rebuild the Gaza Strip. That is about a billion dollars.

It is obvious why Clinton is making this gesture. The United States's name is mud in much of the Muslim world because Washington supported to the hilt Ehud Olmert's brutal assault on the people and civilian infrastructure of the Gaza Strip. Gaza was already a blockaded and abused slum before the war, where 15% of the children were undernourished. Bush urged Olmert on, and Obama has been silent.

So at least the US can spend some money to restore to the Gazans the basic prerequisites for a decent life.

Moreover, the US has increasing competition for influence in the area. The Gulf oil states are planning out the rebuilding of Gaza, and Saudi Arabia and Qatar have already pledged $1.25 billion. Qatar stole thunder in Lebanon last spring when it negotiated a peace deal between Hizbullah and the Lebanese government that brought Hizbullah into the government. The Saudis have been trying to bring Fatah and Hamas together. The US has been irrelevant, because under Bush Washington was just a ventriloquist dummy for the Israeli Rightwing. You can only have leverage as a good faith broker if you aren't completely identified with one side of a dispute.

So people are asking where the US government is going to get a billion dollars to give to the Gazans. That's easy. The US should take it out of the over $3 billion a year it gives to Israel. Israel aggressively launched that war, which it planned out for six months beforehand, even while Olmert was ostensibly indirectly negotiating a truce with Hamas. The war was fruitless and accomplished none of its goals. There is no reason for the US government to be giving the Israelis, who have a per capita income of $17,000 a year, money in the first place. But it certainly makes no sense to reward them for bad behavior, especially given that we are living through the great crash and incipient depression of 2009.

Amnesty International is going further and urging that the UN institute a weapons ban on both Israel and the militant Palestinian factions.



Aljazeera English reports on the psychological damage to Gaza children of the war:



The Gaza War was so clearly an unequal contest that involved total war on Palestinian civilians that Canada's biggest union of public employees has called for a boycott of Israel.

End/ (Not Continued)


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Submit to RedditSubmit to SlashdotStumble Upon Toolbar
Email to a Friend:

Monday, February 23, 2009

They aren't Dogs, in those Slums

The following comments may contain spoilers.

Directors Danny Boyle's and Loveleen Tandan's "Slumdog Millionaire" swept the Oscars this year, in a remarkable sign of globalization. The creative team behind the film was largely British (Tandan began as a casting director and the screenplay was by Simon Beaufoy). But it was based on an Indian novel (Vikas Swarup's Q & A), set in India with Indian actors, and deployed the cinematic techniques of Bollywood, the massive Indian film industry based in Bombay (a city that Indian television news anchors now call Mumbai but almost no one else does).

Globalization is implicit in the story from every direction. Author Swarup is an Indian diplomat as well as novelist, and has had postings in Turkey, the US, Britain and Ethiopia, and he is now Indian High Commissioner in Praetoria, South Africa. So the story springs from the mind of an inveterate expatriate who knows Ankara and Washington as well as Delhi.

And, the audience reception of the film was global, with Indian slum dwellers mounting angry protests, especially against the title. ("Dog," or kutta is a highly derogatory thing to call someone in Hindi, maybe as pejorative as "pig" in the US. Most Indians don't keep dogs as pets, and they are therefore often street animals and go feral. I tried to keep some dogs around as watchdogs in Lucknow by feeding them, but it was always a crap shoot whether they would attack me or the burglars). Just imagine if a film came out in the US about inner city minorities called "Ghetto Pigs." Anti-globalization writer and acclaimed novelist Arundhati Roy slammed the film for neglecting to depict the real working class and its struggles, instead holding out the false hope of sudden riches.

If poverty-stricken urbanites were upset by the title, the concentration on Indian poverty disturbed middle and upper class Indians who have seen their country advance from fourth-world poverty to the elements of an advanced economy. (Within India's more than one billion population, there is a middle-class country of 80 million, the size of Germany--with satellite televisions, nice cars, well-appointed homes, and white collar jobs hooked into the world economy). I can't tell you how tired middle class South Asians get of the Western depiction of their region as destitute, or the use of it to make Western children clean their plates.

That the film was feted in Hollywood even as it was reviled in parts of India was anyway a huge change. As recently as 1992, legendary Bengali director Satyajit Ray received a lifetime achievement Oscar as a nod to the cognoscenti. Ray and other Indian auteurs were in some sense in another universe, off-stage, and so could be symbolically honored at the Oscars. "Slumdog" was the life of this year's party. India has arrived in American arts.

Boyle, the director of "Trainspotting," brings his dark vision to this depiction of Indian slum life. Both films contain disgusting immersions in toilets in fulfillment of an obsession, whether with a cocaine high or the autograph of Indian acting giant Amitabh Bachchan. Both contain scenes of gratuitous violence, whether the smashing of a patron's face by a beer bottle carelessly and indiscriminately thrown from an upper story in a pub, or the cocky gunplay of a budding Bombay gangster. (It is one of the flaws in the argument of figures such as actor Amitabh Bachchan that the film is unfair to India, that Boyle did not exactly portray a Western place like Scotland in a complimentary way, either; he is interested in the downtrodden and hopeless, wherever they are.)

"Slumdog Millionaire" also draws heavily on Bollywood tropes. While most such films are 3-hour melodramas about star-crossed lovers who have to outwit their hidebound parents to get married, "Slumdog" substitutes a gangster brother and his gangster fictive family for the meddling groom's parents as a plot device for keeping the lovers apart. While greed or perhaps a drive to escape existential boredom drove "Trainspotting," Jamal Malik's (Dev Patel's) unceasing search for his beloved Latika (Freida Pinto) drives "Slumdog."

But Bollywood themes are also sidestepped. Whereas in most Indian films, a love affair between a Muslim boy like Jamal and a Hindu girl like Latika would be impeded by caste conventions that make such unions socially difficult, in this film that they are orphans and slum dwellers deracinates them to the point where caste and religion are irrelevant. The only one who practices religion in this film is Jamal's gangster older brother Salim, and even this dallying with mainstream belief and practice has the distinct disadvantage for him of endowing him with a belated conscience. The other context in which religion appears is the Shiv Sena Hindu mob that attacks Jamal's family and neighborhood, imprinting on his mind the appearance of the God Ram (which otherwise a poor Muslim boy might know little about).

The film is plot-driven, not character-driven. In fact, it is puzzle-driven, since each episode in Jamal's life, in almost picaresque fashion, is told around the answer to a question on the Indian version of "Who wants to be a Millionaire?" (The other side of globalization is that such television phenomena typically have iterations in each major country around the world; Indian Idol is now very popular).

Jamal's character, with his quiet stubborn integrity, never alters from childhood to adulthood. Salim is a fighter throughout. And Latika is never defined, swinging between easy coquetry, realistic debauchery, resigned domestic slavery and the high-mindedness of having a one true love. It is the failure of character development and the concentration on puzzle-solving that are the least satisfying and least realistic elements of the film. Would Jamal really never have learned to compromise, ethically or otherwise, in the conditions under which he grew up? Would not Latika have been warped and neurotic and disease-ridden after those years of sexual bondage?

The glamorization of the poor in the film was among the elements that provoked howls of outrage in India itself, drawing charges of "poverty porn" and the promotion of ghetto tourism on the part of the Western affluent.

That the film depicts an one-dimensional view of the poorer areas of Bombay is undeniable. There are Fagins and pimps, gangsters and corrupt building contractors, courtesans and orphans. But poor neighborhoods in India are a dense thicket of social and economic networks, with a working class, shopkeepers, peddlers, and other responsible if poor citizens toiling to eke out an honest living. The film eschews the urban working class for an unrealistic focus solely on the criminal element. Extortion rackets exist. But they prey on small restaurants and shops. If there were no honest workers or businesses, there would be no way to extract protection money.

Both the celebrations and the protests, the bouquets and the brickbats attest the increasing connectedness of the human world, in what Teilhard de Chardin called the "noosphere." Only in a cyberspace-enabled noosphere could worker activists in the poor areas of Bombay mount real-time protests even as a plethora of golden Oscars were handed out in the poshest venue on the planet. And if the workers in Bombay can as a result of the success of the film draw the attention of the world to the costs of unregulated "flat" globalization, if they can counter Friedmanism from the heart of the displacements caused by Neoliberalism, then the saga of Jamal Malik will have had an impact far beyond the realm of cinema. They aren't dogs. They are productive human beings. And their struggle is not over.

End/ (Not Continued)


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Submit to RedditSubmit to SlashdotStumble Upon Toolbar
Email to a Friend:

Khan al-Khalili: Neo-Terrorism and the Gaza Effect?

Some parts of the world, you know better than others even if you are a world traveler. The Khan al-Khalili Bazaar in Cairo is one of those special places for me. I once interviewed its older goldsmiths and silversmiths about their recollections of when the jewellers' guilds disappeared. They thought, the 1940s. I ransacked the used book marts for the Khedivial Printing Press 19th century editions at Bulaq of works such as the chronicle of Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, which I later used when I wrote my book, Napoleon's Egypt. I had my finds bound in the traditional style by its bookbinders.

I sipped mint tea outside the shops where you buy mother-of-pearl inlaid boxes and carved wooden camels. I toured the nearby Mamluk mansion where they filmed scenes for one of the James Bond films. I visited the mosque-shrine of Husayn, the grandson of the prophet, killed at Karbala in Iraq, whose severed head was said to have been interred there by the Shiite Fatimid dynasty. Khan al-Khalili is an emporium to the world. Last year 12 million tourists visited Egypt, mostly Europeans (including a big contingent of Eastern Europeans). Almost all went through Khan al-Khalili.

I can remember talking to one of the store owners, the father of a family friend, about what the worst downturns in business were that he had experienced over the years. He frowned. That's easy. 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982. The Arab-Israeli Wars. It is not, he said, that fewer tourists and customers came in those years. They did not come at all. They were years when the weaker and more extended merchants went under.

The radical Muslim extremists figured this vulnerability out. They thought if they could destroy the tourist trade, they could pull the plug on the government of Hosni Mubarak, depriving it of revenue from that trade. In the 1980s and 1990s they directly attacked tourists.

On Sunday some small cell struck Khan al-Khalil again, killing a French woman and wounding twenty others, mostly French, at a cafe facing the Husayn Mosque.

But it turns out that like most of the brain-dead tactics of the terrorists, this one always backfires on them. So many Egyptians depend on the revenues from the tourist trade that they view attacks on tourists as a death knell for their own jobs and economy. And Egyptian culture has a basic sense of decency and humaneness that they cannot square with killing innocent foreigners. The radicals made themselves political pariahs. The biggest radical group, The Islamic Grouping or Gama'a Islamiyah, once headed by the blind Sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman (who spearheaded the first World Trade Center bombing, in 1993), was rounded up in the thousands. They became so hated and had so few options that they announced they were giving up on violence (not that they were pacifists, but they decided that as a tactic it was not permitted in most circumstances).

The neo-Gama'a was roundly denounced by Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the number 2 man in al-Qaeda. But his organization had become little more than a tiny political cult inside Egypt.

If I had to guess, I'd guess a small surviving cell of EIJ dropped the two bombs from the balcony of the Hussein Hotel into the marketplace.

I'd also guess that the bombing came in response to the Egyptian government's tacit support for the Israeli campaign against Hamas in Gaza in December and January. The radicals had been repressed, penetrated, tapped, imprisoned, watched. They had made deals. There hadn't been a bombing in Cairo for some time. But my guess is that for a few of them, Gaza was a deal breaker.

A recent opinion piece by Mahmud Al-Mubarak in the pan-Arab London daily, al-Hayat [Life] on the "Neo-Terrorists" (translated by the USG Open Source Center) explained:

' From this viewpoint, the justifications for continued closure of the Rafah crossing no longer gets popular acceptance inside or outside Egypt. Perhaps this answers the question on the reason for targeting the Egyptian leadership. Gaza and the Arab peoples with it did not ask Egypt for military help, even though this does not conflict with the entitlement in international law to "self-defense" since the Palestinian lands are "under occupation", with Article 51 of the UN Charter giving peoples the right to defend themselves when subjected to armed aggression. Thus suspicions are raised when the delivery of even humanitarian assistance is prevented!

This is because the logical thing is that in the event of a natural or humanitarian disaster, the people of any affected country migrate to their nearest neighbor . . .

The situation is different in Gaza. The people of Gaza do not want to migrate to Egypt but want to remain in their lands, despite the continuation of the Israeli aggression by air, land, and sea! But they are in dire need of humanitarian assistance. Forbidding the delivery of this assistance to Gaza is considered "a crime against humanity", in addition to contravening humanitarian principles and ethics. We should remember that after the Katrina hurricane struck the eastern United States in the fall of 2005, all world countries rushed to help. This included Arab countries that did so as a courtesy in line with international ethics, even though it was a natural disaster not a man-made disaster and the United States did not need material assistance.

The millions in the Arab countries who are following the Israeli massacres against children, women, and the elderly, directly on the air are poised to create a new generation of "terrorists" who want to "exterminate the Jews by all means", as the Israeli youth put it, for with the launching of every Israeli missile, each piece of shrapnel, and each bullet fired on Gaza anew "terrorist" is born in the Arab world.'


You see, the world has already forgotten Gaza and the horrors perpetrated there, the little girls killed at home while their father was gone, the children hugging their dead mothers for days as aid workers were kept out. But some took it personally. Some thought it so horrendous, so existentially unacceptable, that they had to act. Terrorists are monsters because they most often imagine themselves to be high-minded. They are people who never learned in kindergarten that two wrongs do not make a right, and never learned in life that, as Gandhi said, an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

Whether the Khan al-Khalili bombing was mainly a reaction to the Gaza War it is too soon to tell. That there will be violent such reactions, some of which will probably kill Americans, seems to me highly likely.


End/ (Not Continued)


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Submit to RedditSubmit to SlashdotStumble Upon Toolbar
Email to a Friend:

Sunday, February 22, 2009

Palestinians: Israeli Attack on Jesus, Mary "Racist," Anti-Semitic

The satirical comedy skits put on by Lior Klein concerning Jesus and Mary on Israel's Channel 10 last week have provoked rallies and protests by Palestinian-Israeli Christians, of whom there are about 120,000. They also drew condemnation from Muslim Palestinian-Israelis, of whom there are over a million. Klein said that since Christians were denying the Holocaust, he was denying Christianity. He and Channel 10 later apologized to a delegation of Israeli Christians, and pledged that the skits would not be rerun. (Al-Safir covered the affair in Arabic).

The skits denied Jesus's miracles, said he died young because he was too fat and so could not have walked on water, and said Mother Mary was not a virgin but rather a promiscuous woman who had had many lovers and first got pregnant in high school at age 15. Palestinian-Israelis viewed them as a secular Israeli attack on Arab beliefs and folkways. That is, the pieces were viewed as racist and not just anti-religious but as ethnic bigotry. They were even called "anti-Semitic," since Arabs are Semites as are Jews.

Muslims believe that Jesus was an envoy of God and revere him and Mary. The Quran devotes more space to Mary and the nativity than does the New Testament. So the show offended Israeli Muslims, as well. I saw them on Aljazeera speaking out against the skits and denouncing them as racist (`unsuri).

The way in which the incident was interpreted in the terms of Israeli identity politics suggests that nerves are frayed among Palestinian-Israelis in the wake of the massive Israeli assault on Gaza this winter. Already humiliated by Israeli disregard for the value of innocent Arab life in that campaign, they are sensitive to any slights from the Jewish Israeli majority.

So what did we learn here? A Jewish-Israeli attack on the holy figures of Christianity provoked outrage among Muslims as well as Christians, and was denounced by Palestinian-Israelis (20% of the population) as racist and as anti-Semitic.

One background for this Palestinian-Israeli response is that the crucified Christ is often taken by Palestinian Christians as a symbol of their displacement and expropriation at the hands of Israelis. So the attack on that symbol ('died young of being obese') by a representative of the Jewish majority was doubly painful, since it repeated on a symbolic level the Israeli denial of the 1948 Catastrophe and even of the existence of the Palestinians.

End/ (Not Continued)

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Submit to RedditSubmit to SlashdotStumble Upon Toolbar
Email to a Friend:

IAEA Inspectors: Iran not Producing Weapons-grade Uranium

As I mentioned yesterday, Iran is not producing weapon-grade uranium, and could not easily do so without detection. The Hindu, which despite its name is left of center (and which is one of India's finest newspapers) writes:

' Iran has not converted the low-grade uranium that it has produced into weapon-grade uranium, inspectors belonging to the International Atomic Energy Agency have said.

The Austrian Press Agency quoted an IAEA expert as saying that the uranium substances that Iran has produced at its Natanz enrichment facility have been carefully recorded and remote cameras have been installed to supervise part of the stockpile.

“If the Iranians intend to transport these uranium substances to a secret location for further processing, agency’s inspectors will find out,” he said.

The expert added that “so far, Iran has carried out good cooperation with us in relevant verifications”.

IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei has said that Iran has slowed down its uranium enrichment programme.'


US newspapers are complaining that they are losing money and may not survive. After they put all sorts of falsehoods about Iraq on their front pages, it may be that they fatally wounded their credibility with the US public. In any case, the above report does not show up anywhere on the web or in Lexis that I can find, except here in The Hindu, which tells me that someone is not doing their job.

(See also Dr. Jeffrey Lewis.

End/ (Not Continued)


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Submit to RedditSubmit to SlashdotStumble Upon Toolbar
Email to a Friend:

Saturday, February 21, 2009

Iran Nuclear Program Hyped again

Note to mainstream media:

Iran cannot construct nuclear bombs with uranium enriched only to less than 4%. It needs to be enriched to something like 90% to make a bomb. Iran is not known even to have that capability, and no it cannot be done in 2 months (try a decade), assuming they were trying to do it, which our $40 bn. a year intelligence agencies say they are not. So all the silly articles on Friday about how iran now has enough enriched uranium to make a bomb are just illiterate. Moreover, the report in question actually says that Iran is slowing its enrichment activities.

h/t Jay McDonough.

Now that the Likud is back in control of Israel, flanked by even less savory far-right forces, we will unfortunately be bombarded by inflammatory propaganda about how dangerous Iran is. Iran hasn't aggressively invaded another country in at least a century and a half. In contrast, the Likud never met a war of aggression they did not like.

End/ (Not Continued)


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Submit to RedditSubmit to SlashdotStumble Upon Toolbar
Email to a Friend:

Netanyahu: Train Wreck for Israel, Middle East;
Looming Disaster for United States

The selection of rightwing expansionist Binyamin Netanyahu to form the next Israeli government is being greeted with dismay by the Egyptian government, which remembers him for having derailed the Oslo peace process in the late 1990s.

Netanyahu has vowed to abandon negotiations with the Palestinians, and says he will expand the program of Israeli colonization of the Palestinian West Bank.

Since even before Netanyahu's coronation was announced, the Israelis had been busy stealing more Palestinian land and planning more colonies on the purloined territory, Netanyahu will just be accelerating an already inexorable process.

Despite today's faintly ridiculous attempt in the NYT to depict Netanyahu as a born-again pragmantist, in fact he rejects any withdrawal from the Palestinian West Bank by Israeli squatters, despite Israel's commitment to pull back in the Oslo accords. Since the West Bank looks like Swiss cheese with regard to administration and settlement patterns, there isn't a Palestinian state to be had there without an extensive Israeli pullback, and Netanyahu has never shown any interest in either pullback or Palestinian state.

Now his people are trying to revive this bizarre idea of giving Jordan some sort of vague authority over the West Bank Palestinians as a way of denying them statehood in their own right. Jordan's government has been under severe pressure to expel the Israeli ambassador over the brutal Gaza campaign, and any such active collaboration with Israel to repress the West Bankers would risk toppling the Hashemite throne. King Hussein once accused Netanyahu of single-handedly destroying every positive thing the Jordanian monarch had worked for.

Netanyahu is a train wreck for the Middle East. He is willing to ally with Avigdor Lieberman, an open racist who is gunning for the 20 percent of Israel's citizen population that is Palestinian. Netanyahu wants a war with Iran, and when the Israeli Right wants a war nowadays, they usually want our children to fight and die in it for them. The 1996 "Clean Break" Neoconservative policy paper advocating a war on Iraq was written for Netanyahu. (They are not satisfied with picking our pockets for their weapons and colonization projects). Netanyahu will further oppress and brutalize the Palestinians, which he will keep in a slave-like condition of statelessness, and from whom he will steal what little property they have left. Last time he was in office he went around poisoning his enemies, for all the world like the Bulgarian KGB in the old days.

Netanyahu is the devil's gift to international terrorism, which his policies will provoke. Fifty years from now, the turn of Israel to the hard right will be looked back upon as the beginning of the end of Israel, the time when the crucial decisions were made that rendered it impossible for the Israelis to stay in the Middle East in the face of the increasing popular anger Netanyahu will have provoked in 1.5 billion Muslims. No, Israel cannot be defeated on the battleground. But the French colons in Algeria were never really defeated on the battleground, either, nor were the thousands of Britons who had ruled India.

More bracing realism from Ben White, the the West Bank.

More immediately, all Americans will have reason to rue Netanyahu's return to power, since the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other elements of the powerful Israel lobbies will pull Congress around to support Likudnik policies in the next few years.

And it won't even be allowed to protest where Netanyahu will take America. I mean, really, not allowed.

End/ (Not Continued)


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Submit to RedditSubmit to SlashdotStumble Upon Toolbar
Email to a Friend:

32 Killed, 145 Wounded in Bombing of Shiite Funeral in D.I. Khan;

Sunni fundamentalists used a suicide bombing to attack a Shiite funeral in the western Punjabi town of Dera Ismail Khan on Friday, killing 32 and wounding 145.

Here is video from Pakistani television:



Angry Shiite crowds went on a rampage against Sunnis in the city. The Pakistani authorities stepped in to impose a curfew.

The violent Taliban Movement of Pakistan of South Waziristan is a likely candidate for perpetrator. The Federally Administered Tribal Areas are sandwiched between the western Punjab (or the North-Western Frontier Province to the north) and the Afghan border. The people of D.I. Khan largely speak Siraiki, a dialect of Punjabi, and engage in the traditional religious practices of rural Punjabi Muslims. Some are Twelver Shiites, others Sunnis of various sorts, including Sufis who attend at saints' shrines (strictly forbidden in the radical reformist doctrine of the Taliban). There is an element of ethnic conflict in such violence, since the Taliban are largely Pushtuns (in Pakistan called Pathans).

Shiites recently commemorated that 40th day after the martyrdom of Imam Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. Shiite mourning practices in South Asia include flagellation, attendance as shrines, and the staging of street processions in which bamboo and tinsel representations of the tomb of Husayn in Karbala, Iraq, are carried through the streets. These practices, and Shiism itself, are viewed as idolatrous by Sunni fundamentalists of the Salafi, Wahhabi and Taliban stripes. The following video, from Ashura 2008, depicts Shiites commemorating the time-period when Husayn was martyred, in D. I. Khan:



End/ (Not Continued)



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Submit to RedditSubmit to SlashdotStumble Upon Toolbar
Email to a Friend:

Friday, February 20, 2009

Kyrgyzstan Expels US, Endangering Afghanistan Logistics for US Troops:
Major Victory for Putin

In a major blow for the US and NATO military effort in Afghanistan, the parliament of Kyrgyzstan voted Thursday formally to end US use of Manas Air Force base to resupply troops in nearby Afghanistan. With the effective closure of the Khyber Pass route into Afghanistan from Pakistan, this step endangers the logistics supply line to the US and NATO troops. The move comes in part as a result of Russian aid to Kyrgyzstan. Russia and the Shanghai Cooperation Council have long been concerned about the expansion of US military and political influence into Central Asia.

Aljazeera English has video:



With the Pakistani route under severe pressure and the closing of the Manas base to the US,t is hard to see how the 17,000 new US troops to be sent to Afghanist can be provisioned (see above)



The UN has announced that the 2008 poppy crop in Afghanistan was the second biggest on record. Poppies are used to make heroin and 40 percent of the profits appear to go to warlords, fueling narco-terrorism.

Polling done by the Canadian military in Qandahar province, in Afghanistan's troubled southeast, shows that confidence in the government of president Hamid Karzai has plummeted over the past year to 25 percent from 55 percent.

As many as 20 percent of the people in Qandahar, who are western Pushtuns, say they favor Taliban rule. (This statistic, of 15-20 percent support for Taliban, is higher than in past soundings; the Taliban were widely despised in Afghanistan).

The decline in Karzai's popularity is also visible in this interview at Aljazeera English with former cabinet minister Dr. Anwar Ahady.



Many Afghans are anxious that the US will escalate violence in the Pushtun regions through aerial bombardment of suspected Taliban targets (a tactic that sometimes kills innocent villagers):



McClatchy says that the arrival of US troops in Wardak, 40 mi. from the capital of Kabul has raised anxieties with the local population.

End/ (Not Continued)


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Submit to RedditSubmit to SlashdotStumble Upon Toolbar
Email to a Friend:

Haidar: Bin Laden is not, either, Hiding Out in Shiite Parachinar

Murtaza Haidar shares with IC his letter to the editor of the MIT International Review

[pdf] Gillespie et al. Finding Osama Bin Laden : An application of biogeographic theories and satellite imagery. MIT International Review. Feb 17, 2009.

Dear Editors and founders of the MIT International Review:

Professors Gillespie et al. while writing in MIT International Review have not only identified Parachinar, the town where Osama Bin Laden may have been hiding, but they have also pinpointed the three buildings that they think are likely to be Bin Laden's hideout. Since I am from the Northwest Frontier Province, I find it a little odd that Osama may be hiding in the only Shiite majority town in the entire tribal region of Pakistan.

The geography professors at UCLA may have used spatial analysis to determine the probable hideout of Osama; they certainly overlooked history and anthropology, which would have explained the gory sectarian rivalries between the Shiites of Parachinar and the Sunni supporters of Osama bin Laden. This is yet another example of technical analysis devoid of any understanding of the local socio-cultural and political contexts.

Parachinar is a small town of approximately 20,000 individuals, who are almost exclusively Shiites and belong to Turi and Bangash tribes. The Sunni tribesmen from North Waziristan agency along with other militants from Arab countries and the Caucasus have been attacking the Shiites over the past two years, which has resulted in the death of hundreds of Shiites. In addition, since the Sunni tribesmen control the ground access to Parachinar from Peshawar, the supply of food, medicines, and other necessities to Parachinar have been interrupted for months, forcing the doctors to operate without anesthesia. The power and water supply, which have been restored only recently, also remained suspended.

I find it hard to believe that after having hundreds, if not thousands, of Shiites murdered by the followers of Osama bin Laden, the Shiites of Parachinar would like to aid and abet Osama bin Laden.

It is sad to see that the press in North America has largely ignored this tragedy that has been unfolding in Parachinar over the past two years. It took faculty and students from UCLA to put Parachinar on the map, but only for the wrong reasons.

Professors Gillespie et al. assert that "One of the most important political questions of our time is: Where is Osama Bin Laden?" Even when the crisis in Darfur has killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians; the relentless bombing by American drones and the fighting in the Pakistan’s tribal areas has forced half a million civilians to live in deplorable conditions in refugee camps; and the hunger and disease faced daily by the global poor, the authors still believe that locating Osama is “one of the most important political questions of our time.” Even if Osama Bin Laden is found, what answers could he provide that would make the world become a better place?

Lastly, I am concerned that if the UCLA professors are taken seriously by the trigger-happy NATO forces, who certainly lack ground intelligence in the tribal areas and cannot tell friend from foe, the Shiites of Parachinar may have to fend off bombs dropped from American drones, while they are fighting for their survival against the Taleban on the ground.


Sincerely,

Murtaza Haider
Ryerson University

End/ (Not Continued)


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Submit to RedditSubmit to SlashdotStumble Upon Toolbar
Email to a Friend:

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Iraq: Kurdish-Arab War in the Offing?

McClatchy is alarmed at the rapid deterioration of relations between Kurds and Arabs in the north of Iraq. The victory of the Sunni Arab nationalist party, al-Hadba', in Ninevah Province has dealt a setback to the Kurds, who initially controlled the province's governing council and whose paramilitary, the Peshmerga, was deployed in parts of the province with Kurdish populations. The Kurdistan Regional Government has already erased the provincial divisions among Dohuk, Irbil and Sulaymaniya, and would like to absorb much of Ninevah Province, as well. The Green Line separating Kurdish territory from Arab is being redrawn and challenged, to the benefit of the Kurds.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a centralizer, has come into conflict with the Kurds over his desire to restore an effective central government.

Some of the alarmism on this issue derives from Iraqi-Kurdistan Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani, who says that Obama should intervene to settle outstanding Kurdish/ Arab disputes before the US troops draw down.

The Open Source Center of the USG translated the article:


' Kurdish Officials Warn of Kurd-Arab War if Kirkuk Problem Not Resolved
Report from Baghdad by Rahmah al-Salim: "Deputies Close To Government: 'Irbil Warnings of Arab-Kurdish War Increase Tension;' Kurdish Official to Al-Sharq al-Awsat: 'Nechirvan Barzani's Statements Reflect Real Fears;' American Army: 'We Will Not Side With Anyone"'
Al-Sharq al-Awsat Online
Wednesday, February 18, 2009 . . .

' An Iraqi MP close to Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki says that statements made by Nechirvan Barzani, Kurdistan Region prime minister, about a war breaking out between Arabs and Kurds after the American withdrawal from Iraq, are "a disservice to the political situation in the country."

Sami al-Askari, an MP for the Unified Iraqi Coalition, stresses that "the recent statements made by the Kurds do not serve the political situation in Iraq," and points out to Al-Sharq al-Awsat Online that "Surely there are problems between the central government and the Kurdistan Region government; these differences cannot be solved in this way but through dialogue and commitment to the Constitution."

In this context, Barzani had voiced concern over an American withdrawal from Iraq before a settlement of litigious issues between Baghdad and Irbil, mainly the problem of Kirkuk. He also urged the US to put pressure on the Iraqi Government for a final solution concerning Kirkuk, and complained about the refusal of the Americans to intervene directly in this question.

Furthermore, Kamal Kirkuki, Kurdistan Region Parliament Deputy Speaker, has described Al-Maliki as a "dangerous man", and said that the Kurds are trying to stand up to him, adding: "Al-Maliki is a danger to Iraq and to democracy; he is a second Saddam."'


If the Kurdish-Arab hostity rises futher,the US could be drawn right back in to Iraq. The Eastern Mediterranean and the meeting-point of Syria, Turkey, Iran and Iraq, is too important to allow it to fall into substantial and long-term violence.

Meanwhile, several parliamentary factions may be conniving at a vote of no confidence and a toppling of the Iraq government of PM Nuri al-Maliki. His centralizing tendencies, for which the Kurds ahdve denounced him, are at issue.

------

Unrelated reading: See the recent comments of Howard Eissenstat and Manan Ahmed at Informed Comment: Global Affairs on Turkey-Israel and on Pakistan.

End/ (Not Continued)




For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Submit to RedditSubmit to SlashdotStumble Upon Toolbar
Email to a Friend:

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Obama Orders 17,000 US Troops to Afghanistan

President Barack Obama has decided to send 17,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, on the grounds that "the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan demands urgent attention". Civilian deaths from political violence increased about 40% in 2008 over 2007, reaching over 2000. They will be sent to the Pushtun south and east of the country, where guerrilla fighting is expected to pick up with the advent of warm weather. The BBC says, "The deployment will be made up of 8,000 marines, and 4,000 army soldiers, plus another 5,000 support staff." The Marines will begin arriving in May.

What we saw in Iraq was that the sheer number of troops did not matter so much as how they are deployed and for what purpose. I hope that these troops are used well.

McClatchy reports that the new troops will mainly be sent to Helmand Province, a major poppy-producing areas, and will have poppy eradication as a major mission. If this report is true, it is very troubling. There is reason to think that forcible poppy eradication has produced the growing insurgency. Poppies are used to make heroin, and exports of the drug account for over a third of Afghanistan's gross domestic product. But many Afghan farmers are destitute after 30 years of war, and this crop is their one hope of escaping poverty. They grow irate when someone comes in with helicopters and torches to destroy the crop.

There are currently 38,000 US troops in Afghanistan. Last I knew, there were 10,000 under a US command and 18,000 serving under the NATO ISAF command (which has 32,000 non-US NATO troops), which totals 50,000. But given the determination of Canada to pull its troops out within three years, and the flagging commitment of other NATO allies, it could be that the increase of US troops will just offset draw-downs of NATO forces.

Meanwhile, NATO is worried about the terms of the truce just concluded between Pakistan and militants in Swat, which involves imposition of Muslim canon law on that area. (Most of Pakistan is ruled by cviil law, which may be drawn in part from Islamic law but also has a heritage in British law.)

Aljazeera English, in contrast, sees the agreement in Swat as hopeful.



Suspicions linger that ousted military dictator Perzez Musharraf presided over a military that was glad to do a double deal with the Taliban.

Aljazeera English reports on child labor and 'ragpicking' in Afghanistan, which is exploiting 36,000 children in Kabul.



End/ (Not Continued)


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Submit to RedditSubmit to SlashdotStumble Upon Toolbar
Email to a Friend:

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Iraq Funding Ponzi Scheme Bigger than Madoff's;
8 Shiite Pilgrims Killed

The US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) has issued a report on as much as $125 billion unaccounted-for reconstruction and military equipment money in Iraq. Patrick Cockburn at the Independent quotes a US businessman active in Iraq after the US invasion who observed that Iraq was looted alright, but the big looting did not come at the hands of poor urbanites but rather at that of US officers. Although immense peculation was engaged in by Iraqi government and military figures, it seems unlikely that their US military minders were not complicit in the corruption.

As Digby points out, the same Republican congressmen who never hesitated to vote more hundreds of billions of deficit spending on the Iraq War are now suddenly shy about running a necessary Keynsian deficit to get us back out of the 2009 Depression. Their friends and cronies stole much of the money they used to just hand out like free samples. And they are now suddenly wise stewards of money and fiscal conservatives?

Cockburn says the Iraq embezzlement is a ponzi scheme bigger than that of Madoff. But both gigantic swindles were made possible by the same philosophy, that the "private sector" needs no government oversight or auditing, since the Magic Hand will operate to ensure probity. As Alan Greenspan recently admitted, his conviction that bankers would not steal from us because it would be bad for the bank was naive; I guess that is what comes of never growing out of Ayn Rand when you move into your twenties and later.

As Bush and his henchmen forsaw, an Iraq conquered by the US would be the gift that gave on giving to the military-industrial complex. Baghdad has put in orders for $5 billion worth of US military equipment, which will keep arms factories humming. Of course, if you had just showered a trillion dollars on green energy instead of on Iraq, we'd have it by now.

William Astore at Tomdispatch.com asks if the US military has become an imperial police force. Cockburn's article raises the question of the purpose of the global police force, and the implied answer is that it is for plunder.

Meanwhile, in the real world, Iraqi youth of the lower and middle classes face 50% unemployment, which creates a severe hazard for the stability of the Iraqi state.

Worse, 60% of all Iraqi jobs are in the public sector, and the plummeting of petroleum prices because of the weak world economy may cause massive lay-offs, another menace to Iraqi stability.

On the other hand, Iran is sitting pretty in Iraq, having just won a $1.5 billion contract to build a new city in the Shiite Iraqi south.

The bombings and killings of Shiite pilgrims continued on Monday, with 8 killed and more wounded.

McClatchy reports on political violence in Iraq for Monday:

' Baghdad

- A roadside bomb targeted a mini bus carrying pilgrims near the Hamza intersection in Sadr city in eastern Baghdad around 10 a.m. Four people were killed and ten others were wounded including three women.

- A roadside bomb targeted a mini bus carrying pilgrims in Kamaliyah neighborhood in southeast Baghdad around noon. Four people were killed and thirteen others were wounded.

- A roadside bomb detonated in front of a house in Dora neighborhood in southern Baghdad around 8:30 p.m. One person was wounded.

Mosul

- A roadside bomb detonated in front of a house belongs to a policeman in Maamoun neighborhood in southeast Mosul. The policeman was injured with his wife and neighbor.

- A roadside bomb targeted an army patrol in Suq alMash in western Mosul. One soldier was killed.

- A roadside bomb targeted pilgrims who were in a ceremony for the Arbaniyah of the Imam Hussein at a Shiite mosque in Sada village in eastern Mosul. No casualties reported.

- Gunmen opened fire on a police patrol in Maidan neighborhood in downtown Mosul. One policman was killed and another was wounded.

- Gunmen opened fire on a civilian in the New Mosul in western Mosul killing him at once around 8 p.m.'



End/ (Not Continued)



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Submit to RedditSubmit to Slashdot 8 Shiite Pilgrims Killed'>Stumble Upon Toolbar
Email to a Friend:

Monday, February 16, 2009

You Have Moved on, But the Injured and Burned Children of Gaza Have Not;
Call for Cyberspace Aid Convoy

The demonstrating crowds have gone home. The blog postings have tapered off. The pundits have moved on. Congress is back to its old tricks, ignoring public opinion in favor of the lobbyists and money men. The US public is worried about losing its job or getting back the one it lost. Gaza here is a dimming memory, a momentary nightmare now past.

But the Palestinian children wounded and charred by Israeli bombings are still screaming, their physicians unable to get hold of enough pain killers to still their yelps of pain. Some 5300 Palestinians, most of them children, women and noncombatants, were wounded in Israel's savage war on the Gaza population.



Please consider donating to UNICEF UK's Gaza children's fund (US UNICEF for Palestinian Children here). In fact, I challenge other bloggers to carry the same appeal for UNICEF, among the best aid groups for this purpose, so that we can see if we can create a cyberspace aid convoy for them.

I suggest that we use this icon:

and put something like "I donated to the Gaza Unicef Convoy and you can too" beneath it above our blogrolls.

Outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has ruled out allowing needed goods into Gaza, which Israel has virtually surrounded from land and sea, until Hamas releases captured Israeli soldier Sgt. Gilad Shalit. Olmert is thereby committing a war crime. You can't collectively punish the general Gaza population if you are the occupying authority. It is not allowed to torture that wailing child in the video above by keeping out painkillers, just because some adult somewhere from the same territory captured an Israeli soldier. But Olmert will get a pass on his war crimes. Apparently you only get punished for them if you are weak or lose; it isn't the crime but the power of the criminal that matters. I heard on LBC satellite news that Hamas replied that they think Shalit was killed by an Israeli bomb during the assault on Gaza. The Israelis and Palestinians are cruel to one another, in their taunts just as in their violence.



The United Nations Security Council again demanded that Israel let in food, medicine and fuel unimpeded. Since Israel is still technically the occupying authority in Gaza, insofar as it controls its borders and airspace, for it to engage in collective punishment on the Gazan population is a war crime forbidden by the 4th Geneva Convention of 1949, which was enacted to prevent Nazi tactics from being deployed against occupied populatoins. UN relief workers, have been impeded from getting into Gaza by Israeli authorities. Those who managed to get through found between 14,000 and 21,000 homes destroyed and 240 of 400 schools badly damaged. The value of the destruction is estimated at $2 billion, and the essential infrastructure of the Strip has been deeply degraded, with potentially severe human health consequences. Much rubble has yet to be cleared away, so there could yet be more dead bodies found, and bomb clearing has not been completed, so people may yet be killed by accidentally setting off unexploded ordnance.

It is often forgotten that about half of Gazans are children, because of the ongoing population explosion, caused by insecurity, which has brought the Strip's population to nearly a million and a half. When Israel made a total war on the Gaza population, it was inevitably targeting large numbers of innocent children.



Susan Taylor Martin of the St. Petersburg Times reports on the bewilderment of Fatah activist as to why the Israelis had blasted his house to smithereens. Fatah and Hamas have poor relations and Fatah has been negotiating peace with Israel.

Peace activists and Muslim groups in the UK are attempting to address the continued Israeli blockade of food and medicine by sending an NGO convoy of trucks to Gaza. They will go down through France and Spain, on ferries across the Straits of Gibraltar to Morocco, and then across North Africa to Egypt and the Sinai, hoping to cross at Rifah.



MP George Galloway is accompanying the convoy part of the way. He told the Independent,

' Anywhere else, there would be a Berlin-style airlift, he says. "Almost every window has been broken but Israel refuses to allow glass across the border. So, in the bitter winter, 61,000 families whose homes have been destroyed are living among the rubble and the rest are freezing because they've got no windows. You could solve that problem in a weekend, but because it is the Palestinians it doesn't happen."
'
The volunteers are taking their own aid. "What we asked people to bring was bedclothes, clothes, nappies, food and medical equipment." Does he really expect to be allowed in? "I do, actually. My prediction is that by the time we arrive in Gaza there will be a 12-month ceasefire." If not, they will wait there until let in.'


Galloway is pilloried by the British establishment as an exhibitionist, but he has a knack for speaking uncomfortable truths eloquently. He points out that given the magnitude of the humanitarian disaster in Gaza, the whole world would be doing an airlift if the victims were not Palestinians. As it is, aid for Gazans has arrived in Jordan from Chile and Pakistan. And the government of Scotland has voted to send substantial civilian aid.

Again, I say we create a cyberspace Gaza convoy via UNICEF.

Some American peace activists are beginning to organize for boycotts of and divestment from Israeli companies.



Boycotters maintain that some Israeli diamond enterprises selling in the US are morally compromised in two ways-- they import diamonds from West Africa (which can be blood diamonds, implicated in violence and human rights abuses), and use profits on selling the cut diamonds to support the illegal colonization by the Zionist far right of the West Bank. (All Israeli colonization of the West Bank is illegal, since it is occupied territory and falls under the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, which forbids the occupier to settle its own people in militarily occupied territory or to substantially alter the lifeways or conditions of the occupied population).

I think organizing an effective For America Peace PAC would be a thousand times more effective in putting pressure on Israel to cease its daily violation of basic Palestinian rights. But I also predict that Israeli Apartheid policies toward the Palestinians will deepen under the new, far-right government now being assembled, and that these policies will increasingly attract economic boycotts from the rest of the world. I think Israel is pretty vulnerable to such boycotts, though I think it will take 20 years for them to build up to the point where they have a practical effect. It is likely the next big thing.

On another cautionary note, the multinational audience in Qatar for the BBC Doha Debates (supported by the Qatar Foundation) voted that the Gaza war demonstrated that Arab unity is dead. The governments of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia deeply dislike Hamas, especially since it decided to play footsie with Iran, and those governments weren't exactly effective in protesting what was done to Gaza.

I don't think the big significance of the Gaza War, however, was political. It changed nothing politically. Netanyahu and the far right were ahead in the Israeli elections. They won. Hamas was in control of Gaza. It still is, and is now more popular in the West Bank and the Arab street, too. What has changed? The rockets still get fired at Israeli towns. Israel still occasionally bombs Gaza.

The big significance was humanitarian. So as to avoid negotiating with Hamas, the Olmert government made total war on Gazans, which is to say, on Palestinian children. They need our cyberspace aid convoy to begin healing and recovering. As things now stand, the Israeli blockade remains in place. Children in hospitals are screaming.

End/ (Not Continued)


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Submit to RedditSubmit to SlashdotStumble Upon Toolbar
Email to a Friend:

Ann Arbor Palestine Film Festival

Blogs are not the best vehicles for narrow-casting, but for readers in my area, I wanted to bring to your attention The Ann Arbor Palestine Film Festival, which begins March 11 at the Michigan Theater.


End/ (Not Continued)



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Submit to RedditSubmit to SlashdotStumble Upon Toolbar
Email to a Friend:

Sunday, February 15, 2009

US Predator Kills 30 in Pakistan;
Obama snubs Karzai;
US Succeeds Soviets in Afghanistan?

A US predator drone hit a guest house of supporters of Baitullah Mahsud in South Waziristan on Saturday, killing about 20 persons and wounding 15. Mahsud is the leader of the Movement of Pakistani Taliban Those killed were mostly foreign fighters, especially Arabs and Uzbeks. NATO and the Karzai government blame Pakistani tribal agencies like South Wazizirstan for giving safe harbor to forces that go across the border to hit Afghan police and other targets.

Such strikes, ane especially the civilian casualties they often cause, are extremely unpopular in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. But Senator Diane Feinstein let the cat out of the bag when she said that the predator flights are flown from Pakistani bases. That would indicate that the Pakistani government, which loudly protests the attacks in public, has made a secret deal to protect its policy of cooperating with the US against the Taliban from bad publicity.

Jonathan S. Landay of McClatchy asks the good question of whether the US is repeating the mistakes of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The Soviets were mainly urban-based, and launched a war against the tribal counrtyside, which they considered reactionary.

Reuters asks the same question, which tells us something.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai tells Aljazeera that he has not spoken to President Barack Obama since the latter was sworn in in January. It seems clear that the Obama team views Karzai as a Bush crony who is personally corrupt and ineffective, and are willing to risk bad realtions in order to push the Afghan elite to adopt new policies.



Karzai is said to have told Fareed Zakaria, in an interview to be broadcast on Sunday, "Perhaps they have not been given the information yet. And I hope as they settle down, as they learn more, we will see better judgment."

Karzai was responding to comments by Obama that the Karzai government seemed uninterested in controlling the provinces, far outside the capital. I don't know when the central government in that country ever really controlled people throughout its territory. It is not Sweden, and an attempt to make it so will be a costly failure.

Obama's envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, met with Karzai on Saturday and the US and Afghanistan issued a joint statement that the US will try to be more careful, in air strikes, about killing innocent civilians.

Despite the frosty relations between the new US president and Kabul, Obama is said to have made a concession and will allow Afghanistan to be part of the administration's policy review on that country.

A recent poll found declining Afghan support for the US/NATO military mission in Afghanistan, now at 61 percent. Some 77 percent said that NATO airstrikes that put innocent civlians at risk were "unacceptable."

End/ (Not Continued)


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Submit to RedditSubmit to SlashdotStumble Upon Toolbar
Email to a Friend:

Saturday, February 14, 2009

40 Dead, 80 Wounded in Deadly Bombing of Pilgrims to Karbala

A female suicide bomber detonated her payload in Musayyib on Friday in a tent of pilgrims taking a rest from their walk to the holy city of Karbala, killing 40 persons and wounding 80. The pilgrims were heading to the tomb of Imam Husayn, the martyred grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, in honor of the 40th day after the commemoration of his death. (In many Muslim countries it is common to commemorate the death of a loved one not only at his or her funeral but again 40 days later, and this practice has been mapped on to sacred history and ritual).

Al-Hayat writing in Arabic reports that the attacks raised concerns about a return of the ethno-sectarian violence that plunged Iraq into turmoil and left tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands dead. Al-Hayat says that the timing is expecially bad because it has just been announced by a former officer in the Republican Guards that 23,000 former officers and NCOs will be allowed to rejoin the Iraqi military (many of them will have been Sunni, so anything that worsens Sunni-Shiite relations could derail this move toward reconciliation.

Al-Hayat says that both Sunni and Shiite clergy in their Friday prayer sermons condemned the bombing and called for a cautious repsonse.

Meanwhile, Sayyid Muqtada al-Sadr indicated Friday that his faction might return to an alliance with Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki of the Da`wa (Islamic Mission) Party.


Me, I don't think these bombings actually are likely to bring back sectarian fighting. Most of it was over control of Baghdad, and the Shiites won that struggle decisively. And when there is not a pilgrimage going on, southern police can police the area better.


End/ (Not Continued)

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Submit to RedditSubmit to SlashdotStumble Upon Toolbar
Email to a Friend:

Friday, February 13, 2009

Bombings Kill 12 in Iraq;
Iran, Iraq aim at $5 bn. in Trade;
Iran sees no Need for Negotiations with US on Iraq

After attacks on Shiite pilgrims killed 20 on Wednesday, Thursday saw another violent day in Iraq, with bombings in Mosul, a gas cylinder explosion in Karbala and other violence that left 12 dead.

McClatchy discerns a return of the Baath Party in new guises in Iraq, with Salih Mutlak's National Iraqi Project, which did well among Sunni Arab voters in the recent provincial elections, as exhibit A.

Dahr Jamail reports from Fallujah at Tomdispatch.com and finds that it is still in ruins and that the American-funded Awakening Councils were more about security for US troops in al-Anbar than about reconstruction of the war-torn province.

Iranian Foreign Minister Manochehr Mottaki was in Baghdad Thursday to initial a trade agreement that set a target of $5 billion annually between Iran and Iraq. Three Iranian consulates were also opened in the Iraqi cities of Arbil, Karbala and Sulaimaniya.

Mottaki said that there was no longer any reason for Iran and the US to hold bilateral talks on Iraq suecrity, given the stability and relative security in the Shiite South of Iraq where Iran has influence.

Maj. Gen. Michael Oates, who is in charge of US troops in the Shiite south of Iraq, said Thursday that in his view the security gains there were permanent. He cited the decline of Shiite radical groups (read: the Mahdi Army) and "al-Qaeda" (though Sunni fundamentalist guerrillas did not operate much in the Shiite South in recent times). USA Today says that the situation there is so calm now that some US troops wonder why they are still being deployed to the region. Still, there are two attacks on US GIs every day. (I suspect that a lot of the decline in such attacks derives from the Status of Forces Agreement concluded by the al-Maliki government with the US, which stipulates all US troops out of Iraq by the end fo 2011. Shiite militias that have as a main goal the end of what they see as the US occupation no longer have a reason to fight. If the US reneges and overstays its welcome, however, that violence could come back big time.

Basra in particular has the potential to emerge as an advanced Persian Gulf port, as the British troops leave.

The US kept blaming Iran for attacks and poor security in the Shiite south. Would not we have to conclude, if we accepted that premise, that the new and better security situation of today is owing to Iranian efforts, too?

In any case, the agreement between Mottaki and Oates is remarkable, and perhaps another subtext to Mottaki's comments is that the scheduled US military departure is another element making it unnecessary for the two sides to talk about Iraq. (The Iraqis in any case always found it humiliating to have the US and Iran conduct bilateral discussions of Iraq, as though the two could make decisions that interfered in Iraq's national sovereignty.

The minister of women's affairs in the al-Maliki government, Nawal Samarra'i, resigned last week because her ministry was receiving almost no money from the government and she did not feel she could run it properly on those paltry resources. This is a little reminder that the new Iraqi government is dominated by Shiite fundamentalist parties uninterested in liberating Iraqi women.

End/ (Not Continued)



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Submit to RedditSubmit to SlashdotStumble Upon Toolbar
Email to a Friend: