Jimmy Carter and the Art of Growing Up

Posted on April 15, 2008 by Tony


Carter with Noam Shalit, father of Hamas captive Gilad

You could say Jimmy Carter was tempting fate by meeting with Hamas leader Khaled Meshal — after all, his entirely appropriate evocation of apartheid in reference to the regime Israel has created on the West Bank earned him the label “Holocaust-denier” from the more demented end of the American Zionist spectrum. But Carter, bless him, is sticking to his guns, making the rather straightforward adult argument that has eluded so much of the U.S. political mainstream that the only way to achieve peace is to talk to all of those whose consent it requires.

And I’d say Carter has reason to suspect that despite the pro-forma criticisms of his Meshal meeting from Secretary of State Condi Rice as well as the McCain-Clinton-Obama roadshow, the backlash won’t be anything like the firestorm created by his apartheid book. It was reported today, in fact, that the Bush Administration is regularly briefed on back-channel talks between Iranian officials and a group of former U.S. diplomats led by Papa Bush’s U.N. ambassador, Thomas Pickering. So, far all the posturing and bluster, there’s a back channel. And I’d wager that despite the official sanctimony, Carter will be debriefed on his conversations with Meshal by both Israeli and American officials — because Meshal is a key player, like it or not.

The inevitability of talking with Hamas is already widely recognized in U.S. policy circles, and especially in Israel. Already, the Israelis negotiate secretly over issues such as the fate of Corporal Gilad Shalit, prisoner exchanges and a cease-fire with Hamas through intermediaries such as Egypt. And a poll published by the Israeli daily Haaretz in February showed that two out of three Israelis support direct talks between their government and Hamas — an option publicly advocated by such high-profile Israeli leaders as former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy and former foreign minister Shlomo Ben Ami.

Noam Shalit, father of Israeli corporal Gilad Shalit who has been held by Hamas for almost two years now, expressed a profound understanding of what the U.S. role in the region ought to be, after meeting with Carter. The fact that Carter isn’t perceived as biased towards Israel, he said, would actually help him mediate! Now there’s a basic truth about the proper U.S. role that has been ignored since Bill Clinton bumbled his way through the peace process.

The Bush Administration, needing to maintain its vacuous John Wayne facade, won’t publicly concede that its policies on Hamas have failed and open talks; as with Iran, it prefers to “outsource” such initiatives (to Egypt, for example) for purposes of plausible deniability. But those, like Carter, who’re not running for office, are able to freely advocate talking to Hamas as a matter of urgency. Even Colin Powell has added his voice to the chorus of foreign policy grownups advocating the option. “They’re not going to go away,” Powell said of Hamas on National Public Radio last year. “And we have to remember that they enjoy considerable support among the Palestinian people. They won an election that we insisted on having.”

The Bush Administration failed to reckon with the reasons for Hamas’s victory, and, as a result, has spent the past two years vainly trying to reverse the election result — and has only made Hamas stronger as a result.

So while the Bush Administration may protest that Carter’s meeting with Meshal will weaken its efforts of isolating Hamas, everyone in the region knows that strategy has failed. The idea that it should be avoided so as not to weaken Mahmoud Abbas is idiotic — nothing has weakened Abbas as much as this policy of attacking Hamas while forcing the Palestinian Authority president to jump through hoops while the occupation continues to choke Palestinian life. Carter is simply making clear that it’s time to move on from that failed strategy, and to engage with the intractable fact of Hamas.

To demand as a precondition for such talks that Hamas “renounce” violence and “recognize” Israel is specious: The terms on which Hamas would abandon its strategy of violence ought to be the key subject of discussion with the organization, not a precondition for talking to it. As for “recognizing” Israel, it ought to be noted that the Palestine Liberation Organization amended its Charter to delete clauses denying recognition of Israel only five years after the Oslo Accords.

But just as bearing the burden of political responsibility for the Palestinian national fate had forced Fatah and the PLO to recognize the intractable reality of Israel — as distasteful as any Palestinian would find that, simply because the Palestinians as a people were forcibly displaced from three quarters of historic Palestine in the course of its creation. Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas negotiated with Israel because they recognized that it couldn’t be militarily defeated, not because they suddenly decided that the Palestinian national movement had been wrong all along.

Hamas may be slowly moving to the same point. In an important post on his blog South Jerusalem last week, Israeli journalist Gershom Gorenburg noted that Meshal, in an interview with the Palestinian paper al-Ayyam, appeared to signal acceptance of a two-state solution. Meshal reiterated Hamas’s support for the principles of the unity government, including negotiations with Israel in pursuit of a sovereign Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders. “We are committed to the political platform on which we agreed with the other Palestinian forces and in convergence with the Arab position,” said Meshal, referring to the 2002 Arab League offer of full normalization of relations with Israel if it withdraws to its 1967 borders and resolves the refugee issue. “Thus all the international parties should deal with this political fact and judge the political platform to which we agreed. The challenge here is not to search in the minds of peoples but [look at] the offered political platform on the table and the American administration and the international community should work to get Israel to be committed to it … This is the way out. After that, whoever wants to recognize Israel or not, that would a matter of his personal convictions.” Hamas, in other words, is willing to abide by a Palestinian national consensus over a two-state solution. As Gorenburg writes, “He really wishes Israel would vanish, but that’s not his political program. He’d rather take a couple pills against nausea, and accept reality.”

No matter how distasteful he finds recognizing Israel, Meshal appears to acknowledge it as an established historical fact. And Carter’s visit is a sign that, no matter how distasteful they find Hamas’s own track record, a growing number of Americans and Israelis are beginning to recognize that, as Colin Powell put it, Hamas is “not going to go away.” The symmetry in their reasoning may have profound consequences. After all, peace between two warring parties convinced of the justice of their own cause only becomes possible when each recognizes the impossibility of eliminating the other by military means.

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There Goes the Washington Consensus

Posted on April 14, 2008 by Tony

The International Monetary Fund warns that spiraling food inflation threatens the survival of 100 million people; the World Bank warns that it could bring down some 33 governments. As I wrote on TIME.com last week,

The sociology of the food riot is pretty straightforward: The usually impoverished majority of citizens may acquiesce to the rule of detested corrupt and repressive regimes when they are preoccupied with the daily struggle to feed their children and themselves, but when circumstances render it impossible to feed their hungry children, normally passive citizens can very quickly become militants with nothing to lose. That’s especially true when the source of their hunger is not the absence of food supplies but their inability to afford to buy the available food supplies. And that’s precisely what we’re seeing in the current wave of global food-price inflation. As Josette Sheeran of the U.N. World Food Program put it last month, “We are seeing food on the shelves but people being unable to afford it.”

When all that stands between hungry people and a warehouse full of rice and beans is a couple of padlocks and a riot policeman (who may be the neighbor of those who’re trying to get past him, and whose own family may be hungry too), the invisible barricade of private-property laws can be easily ignored. Doing whatever it takes to feed oneself and a hungry child, after all, is a primal human instinct. So, with prices of basic foods skyrocketing to the point that even the global aid agencies — whose function is to provide emergency food supplies to those in need — are unable, for financial reasons, to sustain their current commitments to the growing army of the hungry, brittle regimes around the world have plenty of reason for anxiety.

The reason for this food crisis is the current structure of global inequality (as someone noted recently, the rich demand fuel for their SUVs, turning farmland to biofuel production at the expense of food needed by the poor) combined with the basic Malthusian reality of scarcity: The very spread of capitalism in previously closed economies such as India and China has spurred rapacious demand for oil and natural gas (whose price rises have an inflationary effect on food prices), and the emergence of a middle class pretty much the same size as America’s, who are not only seeking cars and appliances, but are also eating more meat — and producing a single calorie of meat protein takes seven to 12 calories of grain, which has dramatically increased inflationary pressure on grain prices.

The interesting thing, though, is that solving this particular crisis will require that the World Bank and IMF abandon the economic orthodoxy that they imposed globally during the 1990s — the “Washington consensus,” that frowns on things like government spending on feeding the poor.

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Iraq: Ain’t a Damn Thing Changed

Posted on April 10, 2008 by Tony

The testimony of General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker this week — and the ensuing congressional debate — were so utterly predictable, so bland and so basically unchanged from what we heard a year ago, that I thought I’d check in on what I wrote a year ago on the matter, under the title Why the U.S. Can’t Leave Iraq. And so much of it applied, with such minor variation, that I thought if Petraeus and Crocker — and a supporting cast of senators — can roll out pretty much the same speeches and analysis as they did a year ago, then why the hell shouldn’t I?

Here it is again, then, exactly as it appeared on April 26, 2007:

The debate in Washington over troop withdrawals from Iraq is largely a pantomime for domestic political consumption — the Democrats are maneuvering to disassociate themselves from an unpopular war that a majority of their senators originally backed, and that they know can’t be ended any time soon but for which they don’t want to share the blame come election year 2008. The reality is that the U.S. can’t leave Iraq for the foreseeable future without fundamentally altering the basic goals of its Middle East policy over the past half century, and the Democrats talk of “benchmarks” and “deadlines” is unlikely to be taken seriously by the Iraqi players — except to the extent that they need to humor the Americans. The failure of the Iraqi government to make significant “progress” towards achieving the Bush Administration’s benchmarks may be routinely reported here has a sign of infighting among them or their political weakness, but the reality may be that they have no intention of acting out Washington’s script.

The Iraqis are unlikely to believe the threats that if they don’t do as they’re told, the U.S. will go home — Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki may have reason to fear that the U.S. will try and engineer his ouster in a coup (although it has no alternative leader capable of gaining any traction), but not that the U.S. will simply walk away from Iraq. That’s because Maliki, like all the other players in Iraq, knows that the Americans didn’t invade their country out of some magnanimous concern for Iraqi wellbeing; the invasion was motivated by U.S. concerns and interests. And so the threat to take their troops and go home unless the Iraqi politicians agree to adopt the Americans’ idea of good governance rings pretty hollow in light of the matrix of interests that drive U.S. foreign policy in the region.

It’s not that they doubt that the U.S. will eventually be forced out of Iraq by domestic pressure driven by the cost in U.S. blood and treasure of maintaining the expedition — they’re not “shocked and awed” by U.S. power, remember, and recognize it as finite and fallible. Each of the players in Iraq has a Plan B for that eventuality, but they’re in no hurry to hasten the moment. (Even Moqtada Sadr plays to popular sentiment by demanding withdrawal, but he’s demanding a timetable rather than immediate withdrawal.) They’re actually assuming that the U.S. will eventually go. Until then, however, they’ll continue using the U.S. presence to pursue their own political interests and agendas — even as many of them publicly demand U.S. withdrawal — and position themselves to gain maximum advantage when it actually does go (as opposed to acting in ways that advance U.S. interests in order to allow Washington to substantially draw down). And, of course, Washington’s own position reflects a similar gulf between the actual policy and the public statements — Bush, for example, has always dodged the question, whenever asked (even by John Kerry in the presidential debates) about why the U.S. is building 14 permanent bases in Iraq

“While the U.S. can no longer successfully manipulate regional actors to carry out its plans, regional actors have learned to use the U.S. presence to promote their own objectives. Quietly and against the deeply held wishes of their populations, they have managed to keep the Americans engaged with the hope of some elusive victory.

That’s an observation by Dr. Hussein Agha, in one of the best pieces I’ve read in ages on Iraq, arguing why none of the region’s political players, from Israel to al-Qaeda, wants the U.S. to withdraw right now. (Agha’s piece is an absolute must-read; as are his ongoing contributions along with Robert Malley to the New York Review of Books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — most recently this one.) There’s no comfort in this for the Bush Administration, because it’s not as if anyone in the region (indeed, anyone from Israel to al-Qaeda, regardless of their rhetoric) who believes the U.S. can win in Iraq; the reason all of them need it to remain there is in pursuit of their own interests.

Even while King Abdullah denounces the U.S. occupation as illegal, Saudi Arabia and its fellow pro-Western Arab regimes can’t afford to see the U.S. leave, because such a departure would bring great peril to their own prospects of survival. The U.S. for better or worse long ago signed on as the guarantor of their security, and the spectacle of a stunning defeat for their key backer is intolerable to these regimes — and would force them, at minimum, to fundamentally alter their relationship with the U.S. to Washington’s detriment, in order to ensure their own survival. They’re already suspicious of the Shiite dominated regime in Baghdad, and without the U.S. there to restrain its excesses against the Sunnis, these regimes would be even more hostile, forcing Maliki even closer to Iran and simply deepening the cycle of suspicion and hostility. Also, Agha notes, “As some Arabs see it, the occupation is what holds the country together. So long as coalition forces are deployed, a full-blown breakup can be avoided.”

The interests of these regimes, as well as Israel whose own sense of its military deterrent power has been badly shaken by the U.S. failure in Iraq, need the U.S. to remain. So does Turkey, which sees the U.S. presence as the best guarantor against the Iraqi Kurds seceding and forcing Turkey into a political-military quagmire of its own in northern Iraq. (The flip side, of course, is that the Kurds have used the U.S. presence as a buffer against their Arab and Turkish foes, behind which they have maximized their autonomy.) Al-Qaeda’s interest in having the U.S. in Iraq is so obvious there’s no need to dwell on it here.

Having created a vacuum, Washington simply has no alternative but to fill it — or, as Colin Powell might have it, “you broke it; you own it.” And I have no doubt that if the Democrats were in the White House now, and given responsibility for managing the realm (not just Iraq, but the entire connected matrix of U.S. interests in the region), that they’d reach the same conclusion. That’s why Iraq is seen as such a catastrophe by the U.S. strategic establishment: The U.S. cannot win, but nor can it accept the consequences of retreat.

Agha notes, though, that it may be equally important for the likes of Syria and Iran to keep the Americans engaged in Iraq, because as long they’re bogged down there, they’re unable to contemplate other adventures — and if they should do so, the massive U.S. troop presence in Iraq gives those countries an accessible target for retaliation.

Among the Iraqi political factions, none is yet ready for the U.S. to withdraw, according to Agha:

Inside Iraq, this is a period of consolidation for most political groups. They are building up their political and military capabilities, cultivating and forging alliances, clarifying political objectives and preparing for impending challenges. It is not the moment for all-out confrontation. No group has the confidence or capacity decisively to confront rivals within its own community or across communal lines. Equally, no party is genuinely interested in a serious process of national reconciliation when they feel they can improve their position later on. A continued American presence is consistent with both concerns – it can keep clashes manageable and be used to postpone the need for serious political engagement.

Shias in government would like the US to stay long enough for them to tighten their grip on the levers of state power and build a loyal military. Those Shias who are not in power would like them to stay long enough to avoid a premature showdown with their rivals. Militant Shia groups can simultaneously blame the occupation forces for their community’s plight and attack them to mobilise further support.

The maneuverings of Moqtada Sadr perfectly illustrate the point: He is at once in the government — even since he withdrew his cabinet ministers, he has continued to have his bloc vote with Maliki, and has even been said to be helping Maliki accomodate U.S. concerns by making himself scarce — and out in the street, riding the wave of popular anger against the occupation. He’s not hedging his bets as much as playing out the clock to preserve his political advantage.

In short, the Iraqi political class is unlikely ever to give the U.S. what it wants — a client regime that will secure the interests that drove the U.S. to invade in the first place. It’s not that they don’t understand the demands that Washington has deemed to be in their best interests; it’s that they have something else in mind. Their patience is a lot greater than that of the U.S. public, which is why the U.S. occupation, for them, is a phase that will eventually end, but which they’ll use to position themselves to best take advantage of the moment in which the U.S. is forced to withdraw — or more likely to radically reorder things in Iraq, perhaps by backing some form of coup. That’ll be the moment for Sadr to bring his forces onto the streets, for the Kurds to consider their options, for the Arab regimes to once again back an Iraqi dictatorship, and so on. Until then, however, the U.S. occupation represents less of a crisis than an opportunity.

Last word to Agha:

In this grim picture, the Americans appear the least sure and most confused. With unattainable objectives, wobbly plans, changing tactics, shifting alliances and ever-increasing casualties, it is not clear any longer what they want or how they are going to achieve it. By setting themselves up to be manipulated, they give credence to an old Arab saying: the magic has taken over the magician.


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Healing Israel’s Birth Scar

Posted on April 9, 2008 by Tony


Israeli activists from Zochrot join Palestinian Nakbah survivors in commemorating a lost village

With the 60th anniversary of Israel’s birth — and of the Palestinian Nakbah (catastrophe) — which are, of course the same event, almost upon us, I was reminded this week that April 9 was also the 60th anniversary of an event that has long epitomized the connection between the creation of an ethnic-majority Jewish state and the man-made catastrophe suffered by the Palestinian Arabs. That would be the massacre at Deir Yassein, a small village near Jerusalem where fighters of the Irgun, led by Menahem Begin, massacred up to 250 Palestinian civilians — in what later emerged as a calculated campaign of “ethnic cleansing,” using violence and the threat of violence to drive Palestinians to flee their homes and land, which were then summarily appropriated by the new state of Israel, which passed legislation forbidding the Palestinian owners from returning to their property. It was the events of 1948 that created the Palestinian refugee problem, and set the terms of a conflict that continues to define the State of Israel six decades later. No resolution of the conflict is possible without understanding the events of 1948 — something that precious few mainstream U.S. politicians do. The irony is that Israelis are far more likely to be familiar with the uglier side of their victory in 1948 than are their most enthusiastic supporters on these shores.

I was no dignitary, but just as every politician visiting Israel is still taken first to the Holocaust museum at Yad Vashem, so do did my own official trip begin there in the winter of 1978 — as part of a Habonim leadership training program. The horrors memorialized at Yad Vashem pressed all the intended buttons in my 17-year-old mind, I realized a few months later, as a freshman student at the University of Cape Town, when I came very close to having the crap beaten out of me in a fight that I almost provoked when confronting Muslim students handing out leaflets marking Al-Quds day. I have had little appetite for physical confrontation since age 12, but I did not hestitate to grab the leaflets of a student named Ashraf, and throw them to the ground. He jumped at me, cursing. “You’re trying to deny my existence, you scum!” I screamed. “What about Dir Yassein?” he yelled, as he leaped towards me, restrained by his buddies as mine hustled me away, admonishing me for my provocative behavior. In truth, I hadn’t even recognized myself in that moment; it was all adrenal rage, a channeling of the “Never Again!” Warsaw Ghetto spirit unleashed in me by what I had seen at Yad Vashem. There was no room in there to consider what might have motivated Ashraf, of course; in the face of genocide (which was what I imagined he represented) there was no room for debate.

Yet, Ashraf, too, had pressed a button. I knew exactly what he was getting at by citing Deir Yassein. In the progressive, “Labor” Zionist movement of which Habonim was a part, we had long recognized the 1948 massacre of up to 250 Arab men, women and children in the village near Jerusalem as an ugly stain on the “purity of arms” myth in which we had always cloaked violence from Israeli side. We knew about Deir Yassein, but we could dissociate ourselves from it, or so we imagined, because it had been carried out not by the Haganah of Ben Gurion, but by an Irgun unit led by Menahem Begin. And as far as we ardent young Zionists of the left were concerned, Begin, who by then was Prime Minister of Israel, was nothing but a fascist thug and terrorist — hell, even Ben Gurion detested the man and condemned the Deir Yassein killings.

We in Habonim had no truck with the “fascists” of Betar, the youth wing of Begin’s movement that was now Israel’s ruling party. We stood for a “socialist Zionism” that would serve as a model to humankind of universal brotherhood and equality — thus the depths of our self-delusion. And the Betarim were the first to mock it. They, too, knew all about Deir Yassein. And they laughed at our revulsion over the massacre. “Do you think we’d ever have had a Jewish state if it wasn’t for actions like Deir Yassein?” they asked. Back then, of course, having been fed only the bubbemeis about the “miracle” in which most of the Arab population had voluntarily upped and left in 1948 to make way for an Arab invasion, I had no idea of the organized ethnic cleansing that was undertaken not only by the Irgun, but the Haganah of David Ben Gurion.

(I will confess, though, that at that time, it took reading about those events from Jewish sources, like Uri Avnery, to make it emotionally safe for me to accept the truth; if they were being hurled at me only by those whom I could dismiss as out to exterminate me and my kind, I’m not so sure it would have been as easy.)

The work of Benny Morris and other Israeli historians in the late 80s made abundantly clear that Deir Yassein was no isolated aberration, demonstrating that the mainstream Haganah, at Ben Gurion’s behest, had conducted an organized and systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing to clear Palestinian Arabs off the land that would become the State of Israel. (As to the rhetorical question of the Betarim, actually, the prospects of a Jewish ethnic majority state were pretty slim under the 1947 UN Partition plan, because 45% of the population of what would have been the Jewish State was Palestinian Arab — after all, Palestinian Arabs were the majority of the total population of Palestine, and it was hard to partition a substantial Jewish majority based on the demographics facts of 1947. So, not only Begin, but also Ben Gurion, set out to change those demographic facts.

But our willingness, in Habonim, to acknowledge even what we deluded ourselves was the aberration at Deir Yassein, was unusual. Unlike Benny Morris — whose swing to the right has seen no retraction of his understanding of the events of 1948; these days he simply complains that the ethnic cleansing was incomplete — most of Israel supporters abroad desperately need to believe the mythology about a “miracle” in which Israel overcame impossible odds (actually, the population size of neighboring countries meant nothing on the battlefield, where the armed forces Israel was able to field were more than a match for the armies sent by Arab countries) — and also about Palestinians stupidly just leaving of their own free will, expecting to return as soon as their side won. The idea that Jewish people would load civilians onto trucks at gunpoint and force them out of their homes and into the oblivion of refugee life was unthinkable for Jewish supporters of Israel, because they could not recognize themselves in such actions. The idea that by its very creation, Israel had turned three quarters of a million Palestinians into refugees — and quickly legislated to deny them the right to return — is simply too distasteful to swallow. Better to imagine a bloodless birth, in keeping with what Benny Morris called the “righteous victims” mythology.

The late Edward Said noted in 2000 that Israelis are more comfortable discussing the events of 1948 than are their most fervent American supporters. It’s worth quoting at length:

A month ago, the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz sent over a leading columnist of theirs, Ari Shavit, to spend several days talking with me; a good summary of this long conversation appeared as a question-and-answer interview in the August 18 issue of the newspaper’s supplement, basically uncut and uncensored. I voiced my views very candidly, with a major emphasis on right of return, the events of 1948, and Israel’s responsibility for all this. I was surprised that my views were presented just as I voiced them, without the slightest editorialising by Shavit, whose questions were always courteous and un-confrontational.

A week after the interview there was a response to it by Meron Benvenisti, ex-deputy mayor of Jerusalem under Teddy Kollek. It was disgustingly personal, full of insults and slander against me and my family. But he never denied that there was a Palestinian people, or that we were driven out in 1948. In fact he said, we conquered them, and why should we feel guilty? I responded to Benvenisti a week later in Ha’aretz: What I wrote was also published uncut. I reminded Israeli readers that Benvenisti was responsible for the destruction (and probably knew about the killing of several Palestinians) of Haret Al-Magharibah in 1967, in which several hundred Palestinians lost their homes to Israeli bulldozers. But I did not have to remind Benvenisti or Ha’aretz readers that as a people we existed and could at least debate our right of return. That was taken for granted.

Two points here. One is that the whole interview could not have appeared in any American paper, and certainly not in any Jewish-American journal. And if there had been an interview the questions to me would have been adversarial, hectoring, insulting, such as, why have you been involved in terrorism, why will you not recognise Israel, why was Hajj Amin a Nazi, and so on. Second, a right-wing Israeli Zionist like Benvenisti, no matter how much he may detest me or my views, would not deny that there is a Palestinian people which was forced to leave in 1948. An American Zionist for a long time would say that no conquest took place or, as Joan Peters alleged in a now-disappeared and all but forgotten 1984 book, From Time Immemorial (that won all the Jewish awards when it appeared here), there were no Palestinians with a life in Palestine before 1948.

Every Israeli will readily admit and knows perfectly well that all of Israel was once Palestine, that (as Moshe Dayan said openly in 1976) every Israeli town or village once had an Arab name. And Benvenisti says openly that “we” conquered, and so what? Why should we feel guilty about winning? American Zionist discourse is never straight out honest that way: it must always go round and talk about making the desert bloom, and Israeli democracy, etc., completely avoiding the essential facts about 1948, which every Israeli has actually lived. For the American, these are mostly fantasies, or myths, not realities. So removed from the actualities are American supporters of Israel, so caught in the contradictions of diasporic guilt (after all what does it mean to be a Zionist and not emigrate to Israel?) and triumphalism as the most successful and most powerful minority in the US, that what emerges is very often a frightening mixture of vicarious violence against Arabs and a deep fear and hatred of them, which is the result, unlike Israeli Jews, of not having any sustained direct contact with them.

For the American Zionist, therefore, Arabs are not real beings, but fantasies of nearly everything that can be demonised and despised, terrorism and anti-Semitism most specially. I recently received a letter from a former student of mine, who has had the benefit of the finest education available in the United States: he can still bring himself to ask me in all honesty and courtesy why as a Palestinian I let a Nazi like Hajj Amin still determine my political agenda. “Before Hajj Amin,” he argued, “Jerusalem wasn’t important to Arabs. Because he was so evil he made it an important issue for Arabs just in order to frustrate Zionist aspirations which always held Jerusalem to be important.” This is not the logic of someone who has lived with and knows something concrete about Arabs. It is that of a person who speaks an organised discourse and is driven by an ideology that regards Arabs only as negative functions, as the embodiment of violent anti-Semitic violent passions.

There are growing numbers of Israelis who want to confront the reality of the fact that much of the “Jewish State” is built on the ruins of homes, lands and villages seized at gunpoint from others, before laws were passed legalizing what was, in a moral sense, essentially theft justified by war, and then simply flattening and building over them.

In Chicago, recently, I met Eitan Bronstein of Zochrot, an Israeli organization dedicated to drawing Israelis’ attention to what lies, hidden and denied, beneath their feet, for example by posting signs in the middle of Israeli towns and cities denoting where Arab villages once stood, and explaining the fate of those villages — and other creative strategies to draw Israelis’ attention to the Nakbah. (Click on their video page here for some fascinating material.) And to begin concrete practical discussion on how (not whether) the right of return of Palestinian refugees would be implemented in contemporary Israel. (Click here for video of Eitan in Deir Yassein, leading participants in an event marking anniversary of the massacre.)

Here’s an extract from a piece I wrote two years ago about The Lemon Tree, the most important book anyone looking to understand the conflict could read:

Dalia Eshkenazi, like me and hundreds of thousands of other Jewish kids around the world, grew up believing that the Palestinians had simply fled their homes in 1948, miraculously making way for a Jewish State — either out of ignorance and fear; mostly in response to radio broadcasts urging them to leave so that Arab armies could wipe out Israel. That’s when the Palestinians were discussed at all. Israel preferred (and still prefers) not to think too much about the fact that much of the “Jewish State” is built on the ruins of homes, lands and villages seized at gunpoint from others, before laws were passed legalizing what was, in a moral sense, essentially theft, and then simply flattening and building over them. Dalia, whose family had emigrated from Bulgaria in 1948 when she was an infant, often wondered about the previous inhabitants of the beautiful old stone house in which she’d grown up in Ramla.

Then, one day in 1967, one of them showed up and knocked on her door. Bashir Khairi, whose family — like most others in the town — had been loaded onto buses at gunpoint and driven out of town and then forced to walk miles to Ramallah, had taken advantage of Israel’s conquest of the West Bank to travel to Jerusalem, and then to his old home. Dalia allowed him in, and immediately understood his connection with the house. Thus began a fraught and complex friendship that allowed for a dialogue quite unique between an Israeli and a Palestinian. There’s no happy ending or simple outcome. But her engagement with Bashir allows to Dalia to adopt what I would consider a more Jewish attitude to her country’s predicament: She is a committed Zionist, but is nonetheless forced to dispense with the web of self-serving myths propagated by the Zionist movement over Israel’s creation, and instead confront the reality that it occurred at the cost of a crime perpetrated against another people. For Dalia, the dilemma is to find a solution that avoids turning her own people into refugees. For Bashir, it’s a simple case of the “right of return” and the belief that Israelis and Palestinians can live together in a single democratic polity — a position for which, by the end of the book, he’s spent about a third of his life in prison, as a leader of the PFLP.

I don’t want to get into the nuances — you need to read this book. Go to Amazon and buy this book right now, or for more, click here to hear him discuss the book on NPR’s Fresh Air — or get a glimpse of his accompanying radio documentary from this NPR transcript. And also, this piece of his published by my friend Tom Engelhardt. Believe me, I don’t know Sandy Tolan from a bar of soap; this is quite simply the most important book I’ve read for ages.

The pair find no easy answers, of course. But they are able to conduct an honest dialogue based on a recognition of their common humanity — a dialogue made possible by the fact that Dalia is able to acknowledge what really happened in 1948, and accept Israel’s responsibility. She doesn’t only take Bashir’s word for it; she begins to investigate and finds Israelis who were actually involved in some of the relevant military operations who tell her how the Arabs of Ramla and many other towns and villages were driven out in what, today, would be called a campaign of ethnic cleansing.

I had the same experience myself in 1979, on Yom Kippur, when I read Uri Avnery’s “Israel Without Zionism,” written by an Israeli who was there, who fought in that war, and who bluntly revealed that the massacre at Deir Yassin (as recounted at this link from a liberal Zionist perspective) was not an isolated incident…

The suppression of the history of the ethnic cleansing of 1948 within the Zionist movement — and its substitution by the frankly preposterous myth that had us believe that 700,000 people had turned themselves into refugees with nothing but the clothes on their backs in response to radio broadcasts telling them to do so — is premised on the idea that to admit and acknowledge what Israel had done to the Palestinians in 1948 would undermine the moral legitimacy of the State of Israel. But you have to wonder what moral legitimacy is established on the basis of falsehoods. Israelis know very well where the Palestinian refugee problem came from, and they also understand its significance in fueling the conflict. Why else, when asked what he would have done had he been born Palestinian, did Ehud Barak answer (during his 1999 election campaign), “join a fighting organization”? Barak, a bit of a weasel, really (he tried to suggest, in the wake of the Camp David debacle, that his sole purpose in negotiating with the Palestinians was to “unmask” the duplicity of Yasser Arafat), almost personifies Israel’s struggle with its bad conscience: Despite acknowledging the reason why Palestinian fight, he later insisted that Israel could never accept responsibility for having created the Palestinian refugee problem.

Yet, as the relationship between Dalia Eshkenazi and Bashir Khairi shows, such acknowledgment is the only basis for an honest dialogue between the two sides: How they proceed from that acknowledgment is a major point of negotiation, but it can’t be avoided. In one scene in “The Lemon Tree,” Dalia’s husband shocks his Palestinian guests by telling them that Israel is not afraid of Syria or Hizballah or any other neighbors, but it is deeply afraid of the Palestinians. They’re shocked and ask why. He answers: “Because you’re the only ones with a legitimate claim against us.”

A Palestinian friend told me years later that Avnery was a good friend of his. Early in their relationship, Avnery suddenly realized that my friend was one of the Palestinian villagers that Avnery’s unit had forced onto trucks at gunpoint and driven out of their village near Jerusalem, forcing his family into West Bank exile. My friend poured him another drink and their friendship deepened. 1948 is known to the Palestinians simply as the “Nakbah” — the catastrophe. But for Israeli Jews, too, it was a catastrophe of a different type; a moral “nakbah.” Dalia Eshkanazi is rare — although hardly alone — among Israelis, Zionists even, in recognizing that fact. (Even though, in the U.S., recognition of such a simple truth would probably have her branded an “anti-Semite.”)

I’m not sure how this conflict will be solved, and while I can recognize the fundamental flaws of a two-state solution, I’m also skeptical of the simplicities advocated in support of a single state solution. But I do know that, like the relationship between Dalia Eshkenazi and Bashir Khairi, it will have to proceed on an honest acknowledgement of the humanity of all the protagonists, and an honest accounting of the history of Palestinian dispossession. Whatever the solution, it will have to involve justice and fairness.

And it’s on that front that the U.S. and others have stumbled over the rise of Hamas. To simply demand that Hamas recognize the State of Israel is pointless. Fatah recognized the State of Israel, but only because it had become clear to them that Israel was an intractable strategic reality — not because they recognized the moral basis claimed by Israel for its own existence, but simply because they recognized the futility of trying to fight on to reverse the fact of its existence against overwhelming military odds. Ask Abu Mazen or any other Palestinian leader, for that matter, in an honest moment, would he rather Israel had not come into being in 1948, and I have no doubt of what the honest answer would be. This book may help the objective observer, and indeed, Israelis themselves, better undertand why.

History can’t be reversed, but nor can it be denied. It’s time more Americans became better acquainted with the Palestinians, and, indeed, with the Israelis — and with the big picture of the brutally tragic history they share. Understanding that history is the key to changing its tragic course.

Posted in A Wondering Jew, Situation Report | Tagged , , | 25 Comments

A ‘Revolutionary’ Moment in Egypt?

Posted on April 9, 2008 by Tony

The idea of the starving masses driven onto the streets to demand bread, and then being forced by the violent response of the state to seek its overthrow, had seemed impossibly quaint for decades — the stuff of a distant epoch, kept alive in Broadway musicals and Warren Beatty vehicles in a world where the masses were acquiring cell phones. Bread? Who needs bread? Let them eat arugula at globalization’s ever-expanding buffet table.

But a cursory look at the headlines of the past month — a general strike and mass protests in Egypt, the storming of the presidential palace in Haiti, violent protests in Cote D’Ivoire and Cameroon, demonstrations in Uzbekistan, Yemen and Indonesia, among others, suggests that the proverbial “wretched of the Earth” are arising, all over again, this time in response to skyrocketing food prices.
Turns out the Malthusians, and even — gasp! — their Marxist progeny, were not entirely wrong, after all: Spread capitalism to every corner of the globe (a planet already blighted by a century of industrialism with its attendant sometimes catastrophic climate) and the rich do, indeed, get richer, while the poor do get poorer, although not necessarily more numerous. The patterns are uneven, but basic laws of scarcity still prevail. Global food prices have risen 80% over the past three years, and the primary reason may be the success of capitalism in China and India over the past two decades: Their industrialization has spurred demand for energy beyond the capacity of supply, which has pushed oil prices to levels five times what they were in the mid 1990s. That, in turn, has raised pressure on food prices by making agricultural inputs more expensive, and by prompting the substitution of biofuel crops for edible ones on scarce farmland. And, of course, capitalism has indeed raised the living standards of hundreds of millions of people in those countries — they’re eating more, and better, particularly more meat. The fact that it takes some eight calories of grain to produce a single calorie of beef means that the expansion of meat protein in the diet of previously poor Chinese workers also creates a massive increase in global demand for grains. Throw in climate disasters such as the Australian drought, and you have food inflation spiraling so fast that even the U.N. agency created to feed people in emergencies is unable to keep pace.

And the U.N. is warning, for good reason, that food inflation is threatening the security of a growing number of governments around the world — 33, according to the count of World Bank president Robert Zoellick. The sociology of the food riot is pretty straightforward: Even under detested repressive regimes, people’s priority will be to feed themselves and their kids, with political confrontation a luxury that only angry youth, not yet parents themselves, can afford to indulge. But when kids are starving and their parents have no hope of filling their bellies, normally quiescent people can be moved to act, to take risks.

Moreover, when the source of that hunger is not the absence of food per se, but the invisible barrier of social inequalities that stand between poor people and the food supplies their poverty denies them, things can turn pretty nasty, pretty quickly. And that’s precisely what we’re seeing right now: As Josette Sheeran of the UN World Food Program put it last month, “We are seeing food on the shelves but people being unable to afford it.”

That’s a situation in which people start to question the very property relations that stand between them and those sacks of rice and bags of beans piled up behind that storefront grill and the riot policemen in front of it. Absent those property relations, all that stands between angry, hungry people and a square meal for the night are a couple of locks or windows to smash, and gendarmes that can be politely, or impolitely, persuaded to give way. (Think post-Katrina New Orleans — “looting” is far too loaded a word to describe people defying the property relations that stand between them and starvation. What, for example, would Jesus have done? Come on, you know the answer!)

Hunger, in itself, is not sufficient to create a political crisis that threatens the very survival of the established order. But in many instances, it has been a necessary component of the despair that forces that has forced ordinary people to take extraordinary risks, confronting those armed to defend the existing order — and, of course, revolutions succeed precisely in that moment when the soldiers and policemen paid to defend the existing order look into the eyes of the “enemy” confronting them, on the streets, and they see themselves, their families and neighbors, and the state’s power to enforce its rule evaporates. As the great Bertolt Brecht once noted, “General, your tank is a powerful vehicle it smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men. But it has one defect: it needs a driver.”

The French revolutionaries demanded bread; the Bolshevik slogan in 1917 was “Land, Bread and Peace.” Many of the revolutions and civil wars of Africa, Asia and Latin America in the last century were spurred by food crises. But for a mass outpouring of rage spurred by hunger to translate into a credible challenge to an established order, a second necessary component would be an organized political leadership ready to exploit the situation.

That’s why I’d say Egypt may be one of the most vulnerable regimes in the present crisis. The Mubarak regime is unable to function democratically, reverting once again to wholly sham elections (rather than the partial shams that have allowed the banned Muslim Brotherhood, which everyone knows would sweep a democratic poll, to win a share of the seats in parliament). Detested for its autocracy, its violent authoritarianism, its supplicant relationship with the United States, and the sclerotic social system over which it has presided, the Mubarak regime has nonetheless been kept in place by the threat of force. Fearful of another strong showing by the Brotherhood, it barred most of its candidates from running, and the Brotherhood has called a boycott.

But the food crisis has impeded the regime’s ability to provide the heavily subsidized bread that has been a major part of its strategy for keeping things docile. And the result has been an upsurge in strike action and confrontation. Thus far, the Brotherhood says it’s staying out of it. But as the pressure mounts, well, let’s just say that in Egypt, unlike many other regimes challenged by the food crisis, there is a nationallly organized opposition functioning in the conditions of twilight legality that make a political organization better able to withstand repression, and which sees itself as the legitimate expression of popular democratic aspirations. Just a guess, here, but I’d say the inability of the Mubarak regime to secure popular legitimacy, the popularity of the Muslim Brotherhood, and a food crisis that is raising the level of hunger among ordinary Egyptians might just combine to create a perfect storm.

Posted in Situation Report | 16 Comments

What Makes Groups ‘Special’?

Posted on April 7, 2008 by Tony

Anywhere you look in the media covering Iraq today, you’ll find tales of the U.S. and Iraqi government forces targeting not the Mehdi Army of Moqtada Sadr, but the “Special Groups.” This capitalized designation refers, ostensibly, to “rogue” units of Sadr’s army, who have been taken over by Iran. Ambassador Ryan Crocker even refers to them as the “so-called ‘Special Groups’.” So-called by whom?

Well, according to Gareth Porter, the term “Special Groups” is not one used by any of the Iraqi forces or by the Iranians, it’s a term coined by the U.S. military. And Porter suggests there’s plenty of reason to be skeptical not just of the term, but of the notion it implies, i.e. that those fighting the U.S. and government forces in Basra and Baghdad are not part of the Mehdi Army, but are instead proxies of Iran.

What never ceases to amaze me, though, is how quickly the U.S. media embraces terminology tossed out — often with a politically loaded agenda — by the U.S. military. Indeed, much of the U.S. media has already dispensed with the quote marks. Do a search on google news and see for yourself.

Posted in A Skeptical Read | 6 Comments

The Perils of a Banker’s War on Iran

Posted on April 7, 2008 by Tony


Treasury Undersecretary Levey checks in with Israel’s Olmert

The neocons are not going to get their war with Iran if it’s to be left to their traditional power centers in the Bush Administration to make the call: They’ve lost the Pentagon, and it’s abundantly clear that neither the uniformed brass nor Defense Secretary Gates have any interest in starting another catastrophic war. And the fact that they still have a solid ally in Vice President Cheney doesn’t mean much, because Cheney is far less influential five years into the Iraq debacle than he had been on its eve. Nor is there any significant support (outside of Israel) among U.S. allies for a confrontational path. Still, all is not lost for that merry little band of neocon bomb throwers who’ve spent the Bush tenure quite literally “setting the East ablaze.” There’s always the Treasury.

Well, its Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), dedicated to fighting the “war on terror” etc. via the international banking system. John McGlynn offers fascinating insights into a critical aspect of Bush Administration policy that has scarcely appeared on the radar of most mainstream media. In particular, he warns, FinCEN’s March 20 advisory warning the international banking community that doing business with any Iranian bank, or bank that does business with an Iranian bank, runs the risk of falling afoul of the U.S. Treasury’s expansive interpretation and enforcement of UN sanctions and of anti-terror money laundering regulations adopted under the post-9/11 USA Patriot Act.

The beauty of this approach, from a neocon point of view, is that it completely skirts all those troublesome international diplomatic forums where the U.S. and its closest allies have failed to convince others to apply meaningful sanctions against Iran — most of the international community is skeptical over the claims being made by the U.S. of an imminent Iranian threat (as, of course, is the U.S. intel community, as last year’s NIE showed) and even more skeptical of the value of sanctions in resolving the issue, rather than in preparing the way for confrontation.

But by using the centrality of the U.S. to the international banking and financial system, the U.S. is quite literally able to “privatize” sanctions by going over the heads of governments that might oppose such measures to lean on foreign banks. The U.S. doesn’t even need to prove its case against Iran; it simply warns foreign banks that by continuing to do business — any business — with Iran, they run falling afoul of U.S. regulatory authorities. And which international bank would want to risk being shut out of the most lucrative market of all?

AsTreasury Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Stuart Levey told a Senate committee last month, private sector banks around the world had begun to comply, even when their own governments had not pressed them to act. “Avoiding (U.S.) government-identified risks is simply good business,” Levey told the Senators. “Banks need to manage risk in order to preserve their corporate reputations. Keeping a few customers that we have identified as terrorists or proliferators is not worth the risk of facing public scrutiny or a regulatory action that may impact on their ability to do business with the United States or the responsible international financial community.”

The activist Treasury played a similar role in relation to North Korea, which should serve as an object lesson in its dangers. Levey told the U.S. Bar Association last Month that the North Korea experience showed the potential of his department’s interventions to turn the international banking system into a form of leverage for U.S. foreign policy. FinCEN had targeted the Macau-based Banco Delta Asia, through which Pyongyang did business, for similar measures, based on unproven allegations of money laundering and counterfeiting, resulting in a panic that forced the bank to immediately freeze hundreds of millions of dollars of North Korean assets. In response, of course, North Korea withdrew from the Six-Party diplomatic process set up to deal with its nuclear program, making clear that it would not talk as long as the U.S.-imposed asset freeze remained in place. It took 18 months for U.S. diplomats to untangle the mess created by their colleagues in the Treasury, during which time North Korea actually tested a nuclear device.

Iran, of course, is more integrated into the international economy, as one of its largest energy exporters — and that means denying it the credit facilities to conduct international trade could prove very painful. Don’t expect it to buckle, however. Instead, Iran would be more likely to respond on other fronts where it has some capacity to inflict pain on the Americans. Iran is presumably capable of making the U.S. mission in Iraq far more complicated and dangerous than it currently is, and it might well see bloodying the Americans next door as an asymmetrical means of responding to U.S. financial pressure. And then there’s the oil question: If it’s feeling the squeeze anyway, Tehran might see a short-term turning off of its own oil spigots — or sabotaging those of others — to send prices to $150 or more, as another effective response.

Playing the oil card would also help the Iranians create a counter argument for those countries who do the most business with Iran — particularly China — from complying with the U.S. Treasury measures.

Then again, China, won’t appreciate being forced to support controversial U.S. foreign policy positions to the extent that they impinge on its own trade and investment activities, particularly in search of energy supplies. Beijing won’t want to have to choose between access to U.S. banks and access to Iranian energy exports. Nor will it see why it should have to tolerate such a dilemma being imposed on it by a country currently in debt to Beijing to the tune of $3 trillion, and counting. Bankers in China, the Gulf, and elsewhere, to which U.S. banks have recently turned in a desperate search for liquidity, might be tempted to suggest that the U.S. Treasury’s regulatory energies might be more properly exercised in pursuit of measures to contain and prevent a recurrences of the sub-prime mortgage disaster and related products of a woefully under-regulated environment, than on enforcing unpopular U.S. diplomatic positions.

Given the weakness of the dollar and the U.S. position in the global financial system right now, the international system’s tolerance for the excesses of an activist U.S. Treasury may not be infinite.

Posted in Situation Report | Tagged , | 8 Comments

All Hat, No Cattle #7682

Posted on April 2, 2008 by Tony

President Bush loves playing the Bad Cop, talking tough, laying down “markers,” rabbiting on about good and evil and threatening those in the latter column… The problem, of course, is that the Bad Cop is simply a foil; it’s the Good Cop who resolves issues and provides the real leadership. And, of course, anyone vaguely familiar with the routine knows not to take the Bad Cop seriously.

So what was Bush thinking going off to NATO and demanding that it admit Ukraine and Georgia as members, even when it was obvious to everyone that French and German opposition — based on reluctance to antagonize Russia for gratuitous reasons — would sink the idea. Nope, Bush had to push it. And, predictably, to get ignored, or more correctly, indulged but not taken seriously as he warbles on about his “freedom agenda” etc. — and it’s left to the European NATO leaders to chart a realistic way forward.

Funny, there was a time when the U.S. liked to offer real leadership in such forums and leave the posturing to others. But that was a while ago…

Posted in 99c Blogging | 4 Comments

A Teachable Moment in Basra

Posted on April 2, 2008 by Tony

It should come as no surprise that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s disastrous offensive against the Mahdi Army of Moqtada Sadr in Basra has had the exact opposite effect of that intended — strengthening rather than weakening Sadr, and making clear that he, and the Iranians, have far greater influence of Iraq’s future than does the Iraqi government or the U.S. That’s because Maliki’s shared the fate of pretty much every similar initiative by the Bush Administration and its allies and proxies since the onset of the “war on terror.”

The pattern is all too common: The U.S. or an ally or proxy launches a military offensive against a politically popular “enemy” group; Bush and his minions welcome the violence as “clarifying” matters, demonstrating “resolve”, or, in the most grotesque rhetorical flourish of all, the “birth pangs” of a brave new world. Each time, the “enemy” proves far more resilient than expected, largely because Bush and his allies have failed to recognize that each adversary’s power should be measured in political support rather than firepower; and the net effect of the offensive invariably leaves the enemy strengthened and the U.S. and its allies even weaker than before they launched the offensive.

Recent examples would include

* Last year’s U.S.-orchestrated Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in order to drive the Islamic Courts Union out of Mogadishu. This operation, based on the narrowest U.S. concerns to apprehend a handful of Qaeda men, was blithely oblivious to the reasons why the residents of Mogadishu might actually support the Islamists for having established a predictable social order after vanquishing the extortionist warlords with whom the U.S. was in league. So the offensive, like Basra involving U.S. Special Forces, scattered the Islamists, but they’re coming back. The Ethiopian occupation, and the Somali government it is meant to support, are simply not tenable without the political support that the Islamists continue to enjoy.

* Last year’s disastrous U.S.-backed coup attempt in Gaza in which security forces loyal to Fatah warlord Mohammed Dahlan sought to militarily eliminate the democratically elected Hamas government, provoking the counter-coup in which Hamas took full security control over Gaza. The U.S. and Israel followed up with a collective punishment regime targeting ordinary Gazans in the hope that they could be starved into turning on Hamas; the result has been to strengthen the Islamists, particularly after they blew a hole in the border with Egypt and with it in the Bush strategy.

* The summer 2006 Israeli campaign — at U.S. urging — to militarily eliminate Hizballah in Lebanon, which not only produced a military debacle for Israel but gave Hizballah a major political boost, effectively killing off the misguided U.S. strategy of seeking a zero-sum victory by one half of Lebanese society over the other.

* The 2004 U.S. campaigns against Sadr’s forces in Iraq, and the siege of Fallujah and its Sunni insurgents in the same year.

* The campaign against the Taliban in southeastern Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan.

In all of these instances, the lesson is clear: overwhelming force may be an effective tool against a criminal gang, but against an armed movement rooted in popular sentiment and support, it usually has the opposite effect. The Bush Administration has had plenty of experiences of this lesson, and plenty of time to digest it, but, apparently, to no avail. Instead, Maliki has weakened himself, perhaps fatally, while Sadr once again emerges as the Iraqi politician most likely to go the distance.

And, of course, the U.S. position in Iraq has been further jeopardized by antagonizing the most powerful community in Baghdad.

An equally important lesson from Basra, though, was that it took Iran — in fact, by a senior Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander on the U.S. list of most wanted terrorists to rescue Maliki and the Americans from a very nasty situation once their offensive had stalled and the Sadrists had joined the battle elsewhere in Iraq. Not only does this affirm the reality that Iran’s influence is considerably greater in Iraq than that of the U.S. — Tehran was able to resolve the Basra standoff precisely because it has backed both the Supreme Council, which dominates the Iraq security forces and also enjoys U.S. backing, as well as the Sadrists. The idea that the U.S. can stabilize Iraq while in conflict with — or even on terms opposed by — Iran is now a pipe dream.

To the extent that the U.S. mission in Iraq includes the notion of rolling back Iranian influence, the U.S. is in for a long, and ultimately futile mission. And the idea that it can remake the political landscape there or anywhere else through the application of force is a dangerous delusion.

Posted in Situation Report, The 51st State | Tagged , , , | 20 Comments

Will Russia Partition Kosovo?

Posted on March 25, 2008 by Tony


Russian troops at Pristina airport in 1999, where they upstaged NATO by arriving first and causing consternation in Western capitals

Don’t take it to the bank or anything, but I have a sneaking suspicion that we’re soon going to see something of a reprise of a bizarre moment at the end of the 1999 Kosovo conflict. Having bombed Serbia into submission and secured a U.N. resolution for an international force to enter Kosovo, the U.S. and its NATO partners were stunned to find themselves upstaged by a Russian armored column that raced into Pristina before them, and took control of the airport for the best part of two weeks.

With the NATO powers, or most of them, again having ridden roughsod over international law in order to shepherd Kosovo to independence, Moscow currently doesn’t recognize the legality or legitimacy of what has transpired there. And I see a perfect storm taking shape: Serbia is furious that the price of Milosevic’s brutality is losing part of their sovereign territory; the Serbs of northern Kosovo have no intention of living under the rule of the avenging ethnic cleansers and Greater Albania nationalists of the new government in Pristina, and are showing a willingness to fight to remain administratively connected with Serbia.

And, very importantly, the Serbs of Northern Kosovo have actually called for a return of Russian troops to the area. President Putin has responded by ordering his government to prepare to deliver humanitarian aid to the Serbs of Kosovo.

The Serb government, meanwhile, has demanded partition of the territory as a solution to the crisis, leaving the northern third of Kosovo inside Serbia even if it has lost the Albanian-majority south. The Kosovo government, flush with NATO backing for its independence, has rejected the proposal.

But Russia doesn’t recognize the authority of the government in Pristina, which it brands as a band of “ex-terrorists,” nor does it recognize the legality of the status-change in Kosovo that NATO has engineered. I suspect that the “humanitarian aid” being planned by Moscow will arrive in Mitrovice and other parts of Northern Kosovo on the back of armored columns traveling through Serbia. And its function will be to cement the partition of Kosovo, to reunite its northern third with Serbia.

Moscow has shown little inclination to accomodate Washington, and would incline to pushing back at what it sees as NATO encroachment on its turf across a wide front — particularly when the murky legality of Kosovo’s independence presents such an opportunity. And, of course, with NATO’s main players bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, Putin may well see an opportunity.

The nationalist government in Pristina, of course, would be inclined to resist, assuming that NATO would come to its rescue as it did when the same element — then under the rubric of the Kosovo Liberation Army, listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S. — launched the guerrilla campaign of provocations that triggered Milosevic’s vicious ethnic-cleansing drive, and brought NATO’s intervention to bomb the Serbs out of the province.

This time, the calculus could be different. But it wouldn’t surprise me at all to see Moscow pull a fast one on the distracted White House in the next couple of months.

Posted in Futures Market | Tagged , , | 10 Comments