Informed Comment

Naguib Mahfouz, RIP

Nobel prize-winning Arabic novelist and short story writer Naguib Mahfouz is dead at 94.

Do yourself a favor and read him. If you want a window on Arab culture, forget the posturing politicians (who mostly actually work in English and French), and the American pundits who interpret the Arab world to us without knowing Arabic or having lived in the Arab world (sort of as though Aljazeera’s correspondent who reported on Washington, DC, government affairs did not know English and had never visited the United States; believe me, it would not happen.)

Read Mahfouz.

I suggest you start with Midaq Alley, set in a fast-changing lower middle class neighborhood of Cairo during the British occupation of World War II. If you ever wondered what the Egyptians were thinking as Montgomery duelled Rommel, here is the most painless way possible to find out. The characters alone, and they are characters, are worth the price of admission.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Bush Maintains ending US Occupation of Iraq will Infuriate Terrorists

Bush says that ending the Iraq occupation will open America to a terrorist attack.

I can’t imagine why he says that. If we weren’t occupying Iraq, how would that infuriate al-Qaeda and the Muslim radical fringe?

Can you imagine the discussions in the cave in Waziristan?

“They got out of Iraq!”

“Damn them, this is unacceptable.”

“How dare they leave a Muslim country alone?”

“They are imperialists,aren’t they? Why don’t they imperialize? I am confused.”

“The Iraqis are rejoicing, saying that they are independent and can practice Islam freely.”

“It is horrible, I tell you, horrible.”

“It cries out for vengeance! It is not acceptable for them not to colonize us!”

“I say we hit them where it hurts.”

For a peak at the real world, try here.

Or you could try here. Robert Pape is a social scientist and has crunched the numbers.

As for the argument that withdrawing from Iraq will encourage the terrorists and make them feel victorious, we can turn Cheney’s argument around. What had we withdrawn from in the mid to late 1990s that precipitated 9/11? Bin Laden cited Beirut (two decades earlier!) and Yemen (where we just stopped refueling). This was a pitiful attempt on Bin Laden’s part to convince himself that the US is a paper tiger, not a realistic accounting of strategy! Do Bush and Cheney really want to rely on al-Qaeda propaganda in making their own policies?

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Diwaniyah Ceasefire in Doubt
Spike in Death toll Continues, with over 50 dead

Dan Murphy of the CSM writes about the increasing fragmentation of Iraqi politics and militias at the local level. He argues that Muqtada al-Sadr and even the powerful Kurdish warlords are losing control to local militant groups that take the law in their own hands. His comparison of the PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party) in Kurdistan, which blows up things in Turkey, to the extremist Sadrists in Diwaniyah and Karbala who are beyond Muqtada al-Sadr’s control strikes me as extremely perceptive.

A roadside bomb in the market of Shurjah in Baghdad killed 25 and wounded 25 others. In Hilla to the southwest of the capital, a bicycle bomb killed 12 and wounded 38 at a recruitment station. Altogether at least 50 were killed and 100 wounded, though that is a substantial undercount. Al-Hayat puts the death toll on Wednesday at 80.

Defense Minister Abdul Qadir Jasim Muhammad al-`Ubaidi visited Diwaniyah Wednesday, the scene of fighting between militias, and between a militia and local Iraqi tribal troops. He abruptly denounced the cease-fire that had been negotiated by the elected governor of Qadisiyah province with Muqtada al-Sadr, who roundly condemned the Mahdi Army militiamen that engaged in the firefight. Al-Hayat reports that the rural tribal youth that make up the Iraqi army in Diwaniyah are in the mood for revenge and want to start back up the fighting with the Mahdi Army. For its part, the Sadr Movement in Najaf complained that the governor of Qadisiyah Province had already broken the cease fire agreement, with government troops moving into Sadrist neighborhoods “as though they were Occupation forces,” and firing indiscriminately, killing several persons. At the same time, an aide to Muqtada said the young nationalist cleric commanded his followers to stop fighting and to put away their weapons, and to avoid appearing armed in the streets, lest they give a pretext to forces that would like to move against the Sadr Movement and its leadership.

My guess? Prime Minister Maliki will try to rein in Gen. al-`Ubaidi and try to preserve the shakey the cease fire. The Diwaniyah crisis was settled in the Najaf way, with talking it out and face saved for everyone. The Defense Minister wants to settle it in the old Baathi way, with the non-government side crushed. This would be all very well if the government were a) actually strong enough to pull it off and b) not a composite that includes the Sadr Movement!

Al-Zaman says that an assistant secretary (Mudirah `Ammah) in the Ministry of Justice was assassinated on Wednesday.

Al-Zaman/ DPA allege that Marines on patrol in parts of West Baghdad where Sunni Arabs from al-Anbar province have taken refuge used megaphones to tell them that the US troops were leaving Iraq soon. In Ramadi to the west, Sunni Arab guerrillas clashed with US troops.

With Bush and Blair’s Iraq War, much of the lying was done through silence or silencing others. In spring of 2004 the [oops of course should have been Australian] foreign minister Alexander Downer suppressed a message from a weapons inspector saying point blank that there was no WMD in Iraq. He was briefed by the scientist. And then a month later the foreign minister said at a news conference that the hunt for WMD was a work in progress and he could draw no conclusions. Over on this side of the Pacific, not only did Rummy, Bush and Cheney stonewall us on the empty well, but Pete Hoekstra and Rick Santorum are still effectively lying about it. People in a democracy get the representatives they deserve.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Israeli War on Lebanese Civilians Continues

A top United Nations humanitarian official, Jan Egeland, said he was shocked on inspecting southern Lebanon to find it littered with deadly unexploded cluster bombs. These were for the most part dropped in the last three days of the conflict, when it was foreseen that there would be a resolution and a ceasefire. He said, “What’s shocking and I would say, to me, completely immoral is that 90 percent of the cluster bomb strikes occurred in the last 72 hours of the conflict, when we knew there would be a resolution.”

Egeland was not just harshly condemning a UN member state, which is a breach of protocol. He was also accusing Israel of crimes against humanity. You see, if a rationale could be found at all for using cluster bombs, it would be against a massed, invading enemy infantry corps. But just to scatter them all around a civilian area as a cease fire is imminent is not a legitimate military action. It is a monstrous crime. It is a surefire death sentence on hundreds, perhaps thousands of innocent children, who will find the bomblets and think they are playthings. The government of Ehud Olmert committed this crime as part of its cynical attempt to ethnically cleanse the far south of Lebanon of its Shiite inhabitants. It was a way of discouraging them from returning, just as was the massive demolition of thousands of houses, with bulldozers and aerial bombing, which had no military value whatsoever.

The American people are complicit in these war crimes, insofar as they provided the cluster bombs and supported Olmert to the hilt in his dirty war, which was only occasionally about actually combating Hizbullah fighters (there weren’t any, in a lot of the places that were bombed).

Israel continued its across the board blockade of Lebanese ports, which is depriving dialysis patients of needed medicines and continuing to harm the entire Lebanese economy. 40% of the Lebanese electorate is Christian, and they are suffering along with everyone else. Lebanese unemployment is surging to Depression-era levels.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Rumsfeld Accuses Critics of Appeasement of Fascists

The LA Times reports that

‘ Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Tuesday compared critics of the Bush administration to those who sought to appease the Nazis before World War II, warning that the nation is confronting “a new type of fascism.” ‘

(Click here for explanation of photo.)

The LA Times continued:

‘ He continued, “Can we truly afford to believe that, somehow or someway, vicious extremists could be appeased?” ‘

For an alternative view, see The Crock of Appeasement, an IC golden oldie:

‘The Crock of Appeasement

The warmongers, imperialists, and just plain greedy who wish to use up US troops to gain their ill-gotten goods love to use the word “appeasement.” Anyone who stands against their expansionist ambitions will be tagged with this term. In the lexicology of the Rabid Right, it evokes British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s attempt to negotiate with German Chancellor Adolph Hitler. It is certainly the case that Hitler was a genocidal maniac and not the sort of man with whom one could usefully negotiate. But not all negotiation is equally fruitless. Before that incident, by the way, “appeasement” had a positive connotation, of “seeking peace.”

The rightwing use of the term appeasement, however, turns it on its head. Taken seriously, the doctrine of “no appeasement” on the right would mean we are stuck in perpectual war, always doomed to be on the offensive, always dedicated to gobbling up more of other people’s territory and wealth even at the expense of living in constant dread of being blown up and being forced to give up the civil liberties which had made American civilization great.

It would never be possible to negotiate a truce with any enemy. That would be appeasement. It would never be possible to compromise. That would be appeasement. It would never be prudent to withdraw troops from a failed war. That would be appeasement. In other words, the rightwing doctrine of “no appeasement, ever” actually turns you into Hitler rather than into Churchill.

But we are anyway not stuck perpetually in the late 1930s, and it is not the only exemplary period in history to which we can resort for our metaphors and our courses of action.

The Iraq crisis, for instance, is clearly an odd sort of neocolonialism, which can only ultimately be resolved by decolonization. Decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s was also denounced as “appeasement,” but it was the only right course.

The similarities between British decolonization in Kenya and the Bush administration “war on terror” were pointed out in The Nation last winter.

Britain gave up India (and Pakistan) in 1947. Was that “appeasement?” You may be assured that the British Right saw it that way.

Without this sort of realism, Britain would have tried to keep India and there would have been a bloodbath. Likewise, any attempt by Britain to hold on to Kenya past the early 1960s would have led to even more violence than the Mau Mau and British reprisals (20,000 imprisoned, many tortured) had. And with decolonization, the Mau Mau and violence subsided. Problems do have solutions, and war is not always the best solution. Sometimes the withdrawal of the imperial power itself solves the problem.

You will note that you never hear that Britain “appeased” the Stern Gang, Irgun, Haganah and other Zionist forces that sometimes engaged in terrorism in Palestine, when it departed that territory in 1948.

France “appeased” Lebanon and Syria by granting them independence in 1943. It “appeased” Morocco by giving it up in 1956. It “appeased” Algeria in 1962. Britain likewise “appeased” all of its former colonies. The political Right in each of these imperial countries fought decolonization tooth and nail (I do not admire Albert Camus as much as many Americans of my generation, because of his reactionary stance on Algeria).

Or let us take Cory Aquino’s people power movement that challenged-US backed dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the 1980s. The first instinct of Reagan and the rightwingers around him was to help Marcos crush Cory and her movement. Anything else would have been “appeasement.” But Senator Dick Lugar went to the Philippines, looked around, and wisely decided that the only feasible course of action for the US was to acquiesce in people power. Lugar managed to persuade Reagan, thus averting disaster. Were Lugar and Reagan guilty of “appeasement”?

All counter-insurgency struggles have to be waged at both the military and the political levels. The political side of the struggle requires that we attempt to understand what is driving the insurgents, that we negotiate with them and attempt to bring them into the system. That is not appeasement. It is counter-insurgency. Counter-insurgency by simple brute military force has never worked, except where its wielder has been willing to commit genocide or soemthing close to it.

Is negotiating with the leadership of the Baath guerrilla movement in Iraq appeasement? I favor it if it would save the lives of US troops. Would declaring an amnesty for Baath Party members who cannot be proved to have committed a crime be appeasement? I favor it. Would internationalizing Iraq and drawing down US troops be appeasement? I favor it.

Rightwingers who want to play Churchill and denounce “appeasement” should please go off to Iraq and put their own lives on the line instead of playing politics with the lives of our brave troops from the safety of Washington DC. What we want for those troops, as soon as humanly feasible, is to come out of Iraq and stay out.

And no, it is not so they can then be sent to die in the sands of Iran. ‘

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off