Informed Comment

Tsunami toll rises above 125,000

On very early Friday morning, Reuters was reporting that the death toll in Sunday’s tsunami had now climbed to 125,000.

I have a feeling that it will mount yet higher. Some are saying that the toll in Indonesia alone may be 80,000 or more. As relief workers reach some coastal and island areas, they are finding nobody at all, with entire villages gone in places like Aceh. Just gone.

Banda Aceh in Indonesia, which had recently seen some improvement in the security situation after a long separatist insurrection, has been devastated.

I put a courtesy advertisement on the right for Oxfam’s relief effort and blogads has put up a courtesy ad for UNICEF’s effors. On this last day of 2004, let me just ask that anyone who has been grateful for Informed Comment during the past year take a moment to donate to Oxfam’s tsunami aid project, or to UNICEF or to one of your choice. The death toll is incredible, but the needs of the living are unimaginable.

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Death and Death Threats in Iraq

Some 15 Iraqis were killed in various violent incidents on Thursday, and two Lebanese businessmen were kidnapped.

Dawn reports:

“Three border policemen were gunned down in Baquba, north of Baghdad, while on leave, and the son of local police chief was kidnapped. In the capital, an Iraqi army officer was killed while strolling in the street. Four civilians were killed in an ambush at Shorgat, north of the capital, while further north two civilians were killed and four hurt when a bomb exploded near their car as it followed a national guard convoy. Two more Iraqis died and four were wounded when they tried to break through a national guard roadblock in Syniya, a woman was killed and three people wounded by a roadside bomb on the road between Baghdad and Balad and, in Samarra, a national guard was died and four others were wounded in an ambush.”

Ansar al-Sunna and 2 other guerrilla groups in Iraq have threatened to kill anyone participating in what they termed “the farce” of Iraqi elections.

CNN is reporting that all 700 voter registration workers in Mosul have resigned after death threats. The guerrillas are alleging that the secular process of American-sponsored elections will result in un-Islamic laws. I don’t see how Mosul can participate in the election under these conditions. It has a population of about a million.

The fighting in Mosul that began Wednesday resulted in the death of one US soldier and 25 guerrillas, after guerrillas blew up a truck bomb near a US facility in a coordinated attack.

Radio Sawa Iraq did an interview with Iyad Allawi on Monday in which the dispute between Allawi and Iraqi Vice-President Ibrahim Jaafari over Syria was highlighted. Allawi has accused Syria of harboring Baath guerrillas and allowing infiltration of Iraq. Jaafari has expressed extreme skepticism about these charges. The dispute between the two is in part ideological. Jaafari is a leader of the al-Dawa Party, which has good relations with Iran, which is in turn allied with Syria. Allawi is an essentially American appointee with longstanding ties to the CIA.

KarbalaNews.net reports that Adnan Pachachi, head of the Independent Democratic Bloc, called again on Thursday for a postponement of the January 30 elections. He, Ghazi al-Yawar and Nasir Chadirchi are among the few Sunni Arab politicians with name recognition still in the race.

Candidate name recognition doesn’t appear very important, however. For security reasons, the actual names of most candidates on the 78 party or multiparty lists have so far not been released. This odd situation, in which the candidates are not known amonth before the election, attests to how dire the political and security situation in Iraq really is.

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Pipes Favors Concentration Camps

That the Revisionist-Zionist extremist Daniel Pipes has fond visions of rounding up Muslim Americans and putting them in concentration camps isn’t a big surprise. That a mainstream American newspaper would publish this David-Dukeian evil is. Of course, this is also a man that President Bush appointed to a temporary vacancy at the United States Institute of Peace, after the Senate understandably balked at a regular appointment for him.

Pipes’s little project requires him to attempt to justify the internment of American citizens (of Japanese ancestry) during World War II, a violation on several grounds of the Bill of Rights. I hope Asian-Americans realize that a key wing of the Republican Party, i.e. the Neoconservatives, wishes them ill.

If the American yahoos ever start putting people in concentration camps, I think we may be assured that they won’t stop with the Muslims or the Asians, and Mr. Pipes will come to have reason to regret his imprudence and, frankly, his demonic implication.

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Platform of the United Iraqi Alliance

The Iraqi newspaper “al-Adalah” published on Dec. 23 the platform of the United Iraqi Alliance, the mainly Shiite coalition sponsored by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. It was translated by BBC World Monitoring. Since this party very likely will dominate parliament, it is worth looking at the platform.

First, the coalition includes the following parties:

1. Supreme Assembly of Islamic Revolution in Iraq SAIRI [Or Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, SCIRI]

2. Islamic Al-Da’wah Party.

3. Centrist Grouping Party.

4. Badr Organization.

5. Islamic Al-Da’wah Party/Iraq’s Organization.

6. Justice and Equality Grouping.

7. Iraqi National Congress INC .

8. Islamic Virtue Party.

9. First Democratic National Party.

10. Islamic Union of Iraqi Turcomans.

11. Turcoman Al-Wafa Party.

12. Islamic [Faili] Grouping in Iraq [Shiite Kurds].

13. Islamic Action Organization.

14. Future Iraq Grouping.

15. Hizbullah Movement in Iraq.

16. Islamic Master of Martyrs Movement.

As to the platform itself, it has two parts, basic principles and vision of Iraq’s polity, and then specific areas of endeavor. As for basic principles:

First, the Iraq that we want:

1. A united Iraq – land and people – with full national sovereignty.

2. A timetable for the withdrawal of the multinational forces from Iraq.

3. A constitutional, pluralistic, democratic and federally united Iraq.

4. Iraq that respects the Islamic identity of the Iraqi people. The state religion is Islam.

5. Iraq that respects human rights, that does not discriminate on the grounds of sects, religions, or ethnicities, and that preserves the rights of religious and ethnic minorities and protects them against persecution and marginalization.

6. Iraq that provides a climate of peaceful coexistence among Iraqis without preferential treatment for any group.

7. Iraq in which the judiciary is independent and in which justice and equality prevail.

I’m not sure most Americans realize that the biggest and most important party coalition in Iraq, which will almost certainly form the next government, has explicitly stated in its platform that it wants a specific timetable announced for withdrawal of US troops from the country.

The rest of the statement promises security, fighting terrorism, a depoliticized military; a state guarantee of a job to every Iraqi, social security and workmen’s compensation, state support for the building of houses for homeowners; providing health services and medicine and health insurance; supporting women’s participation in politics, the economy and social life; support for youth and for families; developing industry and agriculture and the provision of basic services; education; etc.

An independent foreign policy is promised, as is membership in the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference. [This plank implies non-recognition of Israel until there is a global peace settlement accepted by these two organizations).

I think we are looking at the policies of the new Iraq. They aren’t what Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Wolfowitz imagined.

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Christian-Muslim Violence in Egypt

In upper Egypt, a Muslim young man is dead after clashes between Muslims and Christians in a village in Minya province. There are said to be 20,000 Muslims and 500 Coptic Christians in Dimsha Hashim, and the Christians have to travel a couple of miles to the nearest church. Apparently one of the Copts had a plan to turn a private house into a church, provoking the protest by a gang of young Muslim men.

Egypt still has on its books an Ottoman-era law restricting church building to Christian-majority areas and requiring government permission, and generally Copts face a certain amount of discrimination in Egyptian society, though in general their right to life, property and worship is recognized.

Note that restrictions on the building of religious edifices by minorities are common in Eurasia. Muslims in Greece, e.g., need special permission to build mosques, and the plan to build one in Athens has been controversial. Even in the United States, Muslim communities have often faced difficulties in getting permission to build mosques or cemeteries from local municipal or county authorities.

Although about 6% of Egypt’s 70 million inhabitants are Coptic Christians, they live disproportionately in the south of the country, called Upper Egypt, and in some places in that region they form substantial populations and are economically and politically powerful. Christian-Muslim conflict is common there, and is intertwined with clan feuds.

The combination of Christian-Muslim conflict and a tradition of clan feuding has also contributed to particular success for radical Muslim groups in recruiting students in Upper Egypt to al-Jihad al-Islami, the organization that later joined with Bin Laden to form al-Qaeda. The jihadis have targeted Coptic Christians, but the government has generally intervened against the radical Muslim fundamentalists.

The Coptic Christian church goes back to the early centuries of the Common Era and is often recognized as “indigenous” in Egyptian nationalism, since the Copts are felt to be the descendants of Pharaonic Egyptians who converted to Christianity, and so are contrasted with the “Arabs.” (In reality, of course, all Egyptians are a mixture of Nile Valley, African, Arab and other groups). Copts have a special place in the mythology of Egyptian secular nationalism, therefore. But for Muslim fundamentalists they are problematic and often suspected (wrongly) of being stalking horses for Western imperialism (in fact Copts played a key role in anti-British agitations that led to Egypt’s independence of London in 1922).

Egyptians are considering the possibility of constitutional and political change as the Mubarak era begins to draw to a close. On Thursday the left-leaning Tagammu Party called for an end to the government’s emergency decrees, a sort of martial law that suspended key elements of the Egyptian constitution, on the grounds that they were blocking economic and social development (-ash-Sharq al-Awsat). Among the needed changes, Egypt needs to reform its laws to grant complete freedom of religion and to stop discrimination against minorities.

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Clashes in Mosul, Samarra

The massive bomb in Baghdad that killed 30 persons and wounded 25 the night of Tuesday- Wednesday turns out to have been an ambush. Guerrillas contacted the Iraqi police, told them the house was a safe house, and when the police approached, they blew it up. They also flattened ten houses around it.

The Guardian also says, “In the southern province of Babil, police said 20 members of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s Imam al-Madhi Army militia were detained on suspicion of involvement in planting explosives and attacking police stations in the region.”

Guerrillas launched a daring truck bomb attack on US troops in Mosul on Wednesday. The US troops replied with small arms fire and then called in jets to bombard the southern part of the city.

Al-Zaman Students in the Colleges of Science, Engineering and Education at Mosul University demonstrated for the first time Wednesday, demanding that general examinations be postponed for a semester, until early February 2006, instead of being held in summer of 2005. They said that the lack of heating oil made it hard for them to study, and the lack of gasoline made it difficult for many students to get to class.

Al-Zaman: Sources in the police announced that they had discovered the bodies of an Iraqi contractor and a female engineer on the road between Mosul and Tuz, and found the body of a Turkish truck driver in Bid’iyyah just south of Samarra. Two policemen were wounded by guerrillas in the district of Yathrib to the east of Balad.

The National Guards said that they had captured 25 suspects in al-Azamiyah along with weaponry, and another 25 in Mahmudiyah, both districts of Baghdad. They alleged that among those captured in Mahmudiyah were some Syrians. An Egyptian was captured in Karradah, along with pamphlets and grenades. They also said that 8 guerrillas mounted an attack on the National Guards in Rustumiyah, but that they were captured after an exchange of fire. The US military announced that three suspected guerrillas were captured in the district of Balad, and clashes broke out between National Guards and guerrillas in Samarra.

It was announced that two Iraqi children recently led the Marines to a site where roadside bombs were concealed, near Baiji.

Around 12 noon on Wednesday, National Guards and guerrillas clashed in Samarra’s al-Bubaz district, which had witnessed a roadside bomb explosion recently. The National Guards were searching the area near Samarra General Hospital, when guerrillas opened fire on them.

Reuters reported of the Samarra clash that it involved both Iraqi national guards and US troops. The US military announced that two patrols had come under fire. US helicopter gunships were called in, shops closed, and the area was deserted. The previous night, a roadside bomb had wounded one US soldier and five Iraqi policemen in Samarra.

Reuters adds,

“An Iraqi National Guardsman was killed on Wednesday in the Siniya area west of Samarra, an officer in the US-backed force said. Around 110 Guards also resigned after their Siniya commander was killed in a car bomb explosion along with several Guards two weeks ago. The eight-member Siniya village council resigned yesterday following the assassination of its president.”

I have noticed a pattern of assassinations of members of provincial and municipal governing councils in recent weeks. Presumably these actions are aimed at derailing the provincial elections also scheduled for January 30. The guerrillas’ success in causing the whole governing council of Siniyah to resign, along with over 100 National Guards, seems ominous. In the wake of all those resignations, presumably the guerrillas that had threatened these people are now in control of the village.

The human side of the poor security situation in Iraq is apparent in Jackie Spinner’s article today for the Washington Post on how widespread veiling has been forced on formerly relatively liberated Iraqi women. Spinner’s piece belies claims made earlier this year by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz that the US had improved the situation of women in Iraq.

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Bush and the Tsunami

The transcript of President George W. Bush’s remarks on the Tsunami is now available. After days of silence and invisibility, Bush finally came out on Wednesday to address perhaps the greatest natural disaster of our times.

He said he had called four heads of state to express his condolences and was coordinating with other countries, and was sending some military logistical help, along with the $35 million in aid now promised (initially it was $15).

QUESTION: Mr. President, were you offended by the suggestion that rich nations have been stingy in the aid over the tsunami? Is this a sign of another rift with the U.N.?

BUSH: Well, I felt like the person who made that statement was very misguided and ill-informed.

Take, for example, in the year 2004, our government provided $2.4 billion in food, in cash, in humanitarian relief to cover the disasters for last year. That’s $2.4 billion. That’s 40 percent of all the relief aid given in the world last year was provided by the United States government. We’re a very generous, kind-hearted nation, and, you know, what you’re beginning to see is a typical response from America.

First of all, we provide immediate cash relief to the tune of about $35 million. And then there will be an assessment of the damage so that the next tranche of relief will be spent wisely. That’s what’s happening now.

Just got off the phone with the president of Sri Lanka. She asked for help to assess the damage. In other words, not only did they want immediate help, but they wanted help to assess damage so that we can better direct resources. And so our government is fully prepared to continue to provide assistance and help.

It takes money, by the way, to move an expeditionary force into the region. We’re diverting assets, which is part of our overall aid package. We’ll continue to provide assets. Plus the American people will be very generous themselves. I mean, the $2.4 billion was public money, of course provided by the taxpayers.

But there is also a lot of individual giving in America . . .

This entire spiel was very well rehearsed and mostly wrong.

As The Guardian notes,

Jan Egeland – the United Nations’ emergency relief coordinator and former head of the Norwegian Red Cross . . . question[ed] the generosity of rich nations. “We were more generous when we were less rich, many of the rich countries,” Egeland said Monday. “And it is beyond me, why are we so stingy, really. … Even Christmas time should remind many Western countries at least how rich we have become.” Egeland told reporters the next day that his complaint wasn’t directed at any one nation.

So Egeland had not in fact singled out the United States. He was talking about the 30 richest countries generally.

Second, Bush is an MBA, so he knows very well the difference between absolute numbers and per capita ones. Let’s see, Australia offered US $27 million in aid for victims of the tsunami. Australia’s population is about 20 million. Its gross domestic product is about $500 billion per year. Surely anyone can see that Australia’s $27 million is far more per person than Bush’s $35 million. Australia’s works out to $1.35 per person. The US contribution as it now stands is about 9 cents per person. So, yes, the US is giving more in absolute terms. But on a per person basis, it is being far more stingy so far. And Australians are less wealthy than Americans, making on average US $25,000 per year per person, whereas Americans make $38,000 per year per person. So even if Australians and Americans were both giving $1.35 per person, the Australians would be making the bigger sacrifice. But they aren’t both giving $1.35; the Bush administration is so far giving an American contribution of nine cents a person.

The apparent inability of the American public to do basic math or to understand the difference between absolute numbers and proportional ones helps account for why Bush’s crazy tax cut schemes have been so popular. Americans don’t seem to realize that Bush gave ordinary people checks for $300 or $600, but is giving billionnaires checks for millions. A percentage cut across the board results in far higher absolute numbers for the super-wealthy than for the fast food workers. But, well, if people like being screwed over, then that is their democratic right.

Bush’s underlining of the $2.5 billion he says the United States gave in emergency humanitarian aid last year annoyed the hell out of me. He said it was 40% of such monies given by the industrialized world. But the US is the world’s largest economy, and neither on a per capita basis nor as a percentage of GDP is that very much money. Bush said “billion” as though it were an astronomical sum. But he spends a billion dollars a week in Iraq, without batting an eye. That’s right. Two weeks of his post-war war in Iraq costs as much as everything the US spent on emergency humanitarian assistance in 2003 for all the countries in the world.

One reader wrote in,

If the US didn’t have 150,000 troops bogged down in Iraq with hundreds of thousands more either winding down from or preparing for deployment, just think of how many lives we could be saving right this instant by putting hundreds of thousands of the most mobile and most efficient airlift, sealift, rapid emergency management, and medical forces in the world to work throughout the Indian Ocean Basin (and for a fraction of the cost of the war). Instead we’re barely managing a couple warships and 15,000 or so troops, a fraction of what we might have done if the Administration had their priorities straight. Opportunity cost may seem like an abstract economic principle, but it seems there’s nothing quite like the most devastating tidal wave in human history to make it crystal clear. Bush’s War is now costing lives in Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, the Maldives, etc, etc, etc.

The US Federal budget in 2004 consists of about $1.8 trillion in receipts and $2.3 trillion in expenditures. The 2003 official development assistance budget was $15 billion (a very large portion of which goes to countries that don’t need the assistance, and is given for strategic reasons). That is about 0.14 percent of the US GDP. Norway, in contrast, spends $2 billion a year on humanitarian assistance, which comes to almost a full 1.0 percent of its GDP. This is the sort of thing that drove Egeland to make his remark. He was even complaining about Norway, which is several times more virtuous than the US on a per capita basis in this regard.

Bush fears the tsunami for two big reasons. If the US government really stepped up to the plate, Bush would not be able to argue for making his tax cuts for the rich permanent.

And, the world public has just seen on its television screens the sort of disasters we can expect if Bush’s denial of global warming continues as US policy. So he has to fall back on silly arguments from meaningless absolute numbers and on vague hopes for private giving. The tsunami says that government is needed to help people. That’s not what Bush wants the US public to believe. But the tsunami is bigger than Bush.

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