Toasting God’s Terrorism and Other Passover Themes

Posted on April 11, 2006 by Tony

1. Passover is About Liberation; Not Simply About Jews

In that hungry eternity of singing and praying in an alien tongue that spanned from your first taste of haroset on matzoh to the arrival of the matzoh ball soup, you could sometimes get to thinking about the meanings of the passover in universal context rather than in terms of the fetishistic rituals that have in many cases have replaced those meanings. (Does the Jewish God really care if there are a few breadcrumbs nestling undetected at the bottom of your toaster in a week when you’re supposed to constipate yourself on matzoh?) And growing up Jewish in apartheid South Africa, it wasn’t hard to see that the annual pesach seder was an elaborate exercise in missing the point. This from a little memoir thingie I’m working on:

Thus the bizarre spectacle, every Pesach, of our extended family – and countless others — sitting around elaborate Seder tables singing “Avadim Hayeinu” (“Once we Were Slaves”) while women who lived in our back yards in a latterday equivalent of slavery carried in steaming tureens of matzoh ball soup and platters of brisket and tzimmes.

Dai-dai-yeinu, we sang, that table-thumping beerhall-chant of a song praising God for his generosity to our people in bondage. “Had God brought us out of Egypt and not supported us in the wilderness, It would have been enough!” Dai-dai-yeinu. “Had God given us the Sabbath and not the Torah, It would have been enough!” But not only did he free us from slavery and support us in the wilderness and give us the Torah and the Sabbath; he sent us to sunny South Africa and gave us slaves of our own!
Dayeinu.

Unless the God of the Jews is nothing more than a tribal totem, it’s plain to my adult sensibility that the problem in Egypt wasn’t simply that WE were the slaves; the problem was slavery itself. That idea was hardly embraced by the adults around my seder table in those years. The cousins and uncles, small businessmen all, would race rapidly through the Hagada’s tales of bondage and deliverance in a Hebrew they’d learned by rote and scarcely understood, and then sit back to be served by people whose own reading of the Old Testament placed them squarely in the role of the Jews under Pharoah.

Years later, in my activist days, this was a theme I encountered repeatedly in the countless rallies and funerals I attended in African townships — ordinary working class black men and women, in the style of lay preachers, offering solace to crowds of squatters facing eviction or communities burying children shot dead in confrontations with the police by likening their own plight to that of the Hebrews in Egypt, and casting the road of struggle as the path to deliverance first charted by Moses.

But around my own seder tables, the descendants of Pharoah’s slaves paid scant attention to the plight of those in their kitchens. They were discussing real estate and accounting scams — and, of course, how long it might be before “the schwartzes” (yiddish for “blacks”) would rise up and spoil the party.

If the great rabbi Hillel was right (and I believe he was) that Judaism is less about rituals and the minutiae of halachic law than it is about the ethical treatment of others, I can safely say that I learned very little of Judaism in the more than 200 hours of family Seders I sat through in South Africa. In keeping with thousands of years of tradition, we always kept a chair empty and a glass full in case the Prophet Elijah showed up. Looking back, I shudder to think what he would have made of the spectacle had he actually accepted the invitation.

The great thing about growing up in apartheid South Africa, despite the country-club antisemitism that was an integral part of the South African Jewish experience — and despite the best efforts of some of my Zionist educators to convince me that we were history’s eternal victims — it was simply impossible for any intelligent Jew to claim the mantle of victimhood in South Africa. There was slavery and oppression going on, but we were not its victims; we were — unless we actively resisted — among its beneficiaries. South African reality challenged a young Jew to recognize the universal meaning of the Passover narrative and the Jewish experience and ethics more broadly.

But we were also in great danger of allowing what I’d call a narrow-nationalist reading of the Hagadah, and the Jewish experience more broadly, to blind us to the ethical obligations at the root of Judaism (“that which is hateful unto yourself, do not do unto others”). If we simply sat down once a year to gorge on matzoh balls and remind ourselves that once we were slaves, we could very easily blind ourselves to our individual ethical challengs in an apartheid society. Or to the ways that the state that claimed to act in our collective name had oppressed others — and had become the apartheid regime’s most important ally and collaborator on a military level — by virtue of engaging that sense of eternal victimhood to silence any challenge.

2. Toasting God’s Terrorism: Means and Ends

As a child, I loved nothing more than making a huge mess of sweet kiddush wine in my plate (for which I’d previously stomped the grapes in a plastic bucket in my aunt Sonia’s basement) as we chanted our way through the Ten Plagues visited by God upon the Egyptians in order to force Pharaoh to free us. Later, it just became another numb ritual that I executed without thinking. But I remember one year, now a twentysomething activist in the liberation movement, being a little horrified by what we were celebrating here. (After all, the ANC had, in the face of strong pressure from angry township youth, scrupulously maintained its rejection of terrorism, i.e. of deliberately targeting civilians — one or two guerrillas had crossed this line, but it was never policy and they were subject to discipline.) The plagues include poisoning the Egyptians’ drinking water, killing their cattle by disease, blistering their skin with boils, sending a hailstorm that killed people and destroyed a year’s crops and following that up with a plague of locusts to finish off the vegetation that survived the hail, and then, when Pharaoh still didn’t heed Moses’s plea, God killed the firstborn son of every Egyptian family.

The objective, universally accepted definition of terrorism violence directed randomly against the non-combatant population in order to force an authority to make a desired political change. And having watched the ANC grapple with that issue and then choose the ethical course, I was a little repelled by the fact that, for all these years, our seders had been celebrating the murder of children as a means of securing our freedom.

So, at that particular seder, I made a comment to the effect that this seemed to be the equivalent of the ANC deciding to start blowing up white kindergartens in order to hasten the collapse of apartheid. It seemed morally repugnant. A family member could see my qualms, but nonetheless insisted, “Yes, but this is different. In Egypt, this was the only thing that worked.” Which, of course, is exactly the argument used by those Palestinians who have advocated the morally and politically disastrous strategy of sending suicide bombers to kill Israeli children.

3. Jews Aren’t in Bondage, Today. But the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Are

It is traditional, at the seders of more liberally-minded people, to invite those gathered to think, for a moment, of the many people in the world who are not free, and to whom the universal message of freedom inherent in the Passover story nonetheless applies. It is as well that we teach our children to think not only of their own freedoms, but also to remember the suffering people of Darfur, or Chechnya, or Burma or countless other places. But I wonder how often that injunction is taken as an opportunity to think about the Palestinians, whose bondage is maintained in our name.

Life for the average Palestinian on the West Bank is a Kafkaesque series of constantly changing restrictions on their freedom of movement. The Palestinian Authority cabinet conducts its meetings by video linkup, because members are unable to travel from Gaza or Jerusalem into the West Bank, and vice versa. Ah yes, but they’re Hamas, aren’t they? Of course they are. And a simple glance at living conditions on the West Bank and Gaza — and the failure of a decade of Fatah’s diplomatic strategy to even halt (never mind reverse) the encroachment of Israel’s settlements and its security wall onto more and more Palestinian land, bringing more and more restrictions on their freedom of movement — should be enough to make clear why the Palestinian electorate voted for Hamas. Israelis correctly point out that the second intifada begat Ariel Sharon. But it would be equally accurate to say that Israel’s failure to pursue a just peace with the Palestinians and instead look to hang onto as much of the colonized West Bank as possible via unilateral redrawing of boundaries etc. begat Hamas.

My South African Habonim elders, by then settled on Kibbutz Yizreel, warned us during a visit there in 1978 that the settlement strategy being pursued by the then-Begin government, and its Agriculture Minister Ariel Sharon, was a disaster that would turn Israel into an apartheid state. And they were not wrong. Even the mainstream (Sharon) Israeli right today speaks of ending the occupation. But by that they mean Israel doesn’t want to directly rule over the Palestinians — not that they’re ready to return the land seized after 1967, for example. Well, they’ll return some of it, as they’ve done in Gaza, keeping sovereign control that allows them to punish the Palestinians for electing Hamas by laying siege and “putting them on a diet,” as former Sharon aide Dov Weissglass so bluntly put it. But in the West Bank, they’ll decide which settlements to evacuate and which to keep and expand, and then proclaiming the Olmert’s plan to unilaterally redraw Israel’s boundaries so that they surround two separate Palestinian enclaves divided by an Israeli corridor is a step towards “peace.” There’s no basis for that international law, as I understand it, and more importantly, there’s no justice in it.

Yet, by invoking our own historical suffering as a people as if it gives us carte blanche to dispossess and shackle others — and by branding those who would question or challenge the wisdom and morality of these actions as “antisemites,” the advocates of Jewish nationalism have been remarkably successful in enforcing a wall of silence around their activities. For my understanding of Jewishness as primarily an ethical calling that is in many ways inherently at odds with nationalism, the siege of Gaza is an outrage and the occupation and settlement of the West Bank is an outrage.

Five Questions for the 2006 Seder

* Do we honestly believe that Israel holding on to the West Bank settlement blocs or the Jordan Valley or East Jerusalem is justice?

* Do we honestly believe that the Palestinians will ever accept those terms?

* Do we honestly believe that the wider Arab world will ever accept the idea that all of Jerusalem, the battle for which hunreds of thousands of Muslims gave their lives during the Crusades (when, incidentally, we Jews were on their side) is to remain under Israeli control for all eternity, just because Israel says it will and currently has the military might to impose its will?

* Do we honestly believe that collective punishment and humiliation of the Palestinians will lead them to elect a government more to Israel and America’s liking?

* And, finally, how would we, honestly, think and act in relation to Israel if we’d been unlucky enough to be born Palestinian?










Posted in A Wondering Jew, Situation Report | 21 Comments

Win-Win Solution on Immigration and Empire

Posted on April 6, 2006 by Tony


Rather than British ground troops, Britain relied on
an 80-percent Indian force to police Iraq. And when that
couldn’t do the trick, the Royal Air Force pioneered the
art of dropping bombs on population-centers

Far be it from me to tell America how to run its immigration policy or police its empire, it does nonetheless strike me that the politicians in Washington are missing an obvious win-win solution of the type that would have made Bill Clinton salivate.

There are literally millions of people throughout Latin America who are ready to take considerable risks in order to reach the United States and make new lives for themselves here — preferably with the coveted green card and then citizenship to make it legal. And there are also literally millions of people in Iraq who want nothing to do with the United States — in fact, don’t want the U.S. in their midst at all — which makes it such a difficult place for U.S. troops to police. But police it they will, President Bush has made clear, in announcing that the decision about withdrawing from Iraq will be left to future presidents.

The American voter is getting increasingly unhappy about the burden of occupation in Iraq. And also about the influx of immigrants. So what to do?

Well, how about learning from the British. They also occupied Iraq, whose state they had pretty much designed, from the end of the first world war until they had stood up a friendly monarchy. But most of the British boots on the ground in Iraq were not on British feet; they were worn by soldiers recruited in India, who made up 80 percent of the British force in Iraq.

Rather than rely on an increasingly uneasy U.S. public to pay the price, a long-term deployment in Iraq may be a lot easier if the U.S. were to staff it with green-card Marines. The Romans did it; so did the British. It’s the art of empire… But, of course, that didn’t work for very long, so the RAF had to bomb the rebellious buggers into submission. Which, of course, the U.S. is also increasingly wont to do…

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Why Germany Won’t Win the World Cup

Posted on April 5, 2006 by Tony


Mourinho’s white flag: Robert Huth

1. They’re too home-based

Most of the world’s best footballers earn their living in one of three domestic leagues: Spain’s La Liga; Italy’s Seria A; and the English Premiership. In other words, Germany’s Bundesliga is not one of them. Today you don’t expect the likes of Bayern Munich or Borussia Dortmund or Bayer Leverkeusen to be there in the final four of the European Champion’s League, never mind win the thing. So what’s this got to do with the World Cup?

Well, if you compare the current squads of the last tournament’s finalists, you’ll notice that pretty much of all of the Brazilian squad plays in one of those three leagues (perhaps one or two Bundesliga and Dutch Eredivisie players will make the cut). By contrast only two of the current German squad play outside of the Bundesliga — second-choice goalkeeper Jens Lehmann of Arsenal, and Chelsea clogger Robert Huth (who is like Jose Mourinho’s equivalent of the boxing coach’s towell, tossed into the game as a late substitute when he knows he’s beaten). If Coach Klinsmann has the sense to pick Liverpool’s own Didi Hamman, which currently seems unlikely, that would make three. And the only Bundesliga player attracting a major bid from the Big Leagues now is Michael Ballack, who on his day can be a midfield match winner but somehow lacks the majesty of a Lothar Matthaus (who, incidentally, at his peak was earning his wage at Italy’s Inter Milan, along with legendary striker Karl-Heinz Rummenige). Carsten Ramelow? Torsten Frings? Sebastian Deisler? Germany today simply doesn’t have the players that strike fear into their opponents. It’s a long-term trend. (More on this below.)

2. They Haven’t Been Tested in Real Competition

As hosts, they didn’t have to qualify for the tournament, so for the past four years they have been playing only friendlies, which these days are a bit of a joke. And frankly, they were fortunate to make the final last time around; they hardly looked like world beaters in Korea.

3. They Don’t Have a Serious Coach

Jurgen Klinsmann was a useful striker (although he was no Rummenige), but he’s never coached at club level. He’s taken on the German national team while continuing to live in sunny California. It’s hard to imagine him inspiring the sort of respect from the players that your typical Bundesliga authoritarian, such as a Otmar Hitzfeld or even some of the more established names of German football such as Beckenbauer, could command.

4. Yes, They’re at Home, But…

So are the Dutch. And the French. And Italians. And Poles. Hell, even the English will feel at home: Europe is very, very small, and all the European teams can expect masses of support in the stadium every time they play.

deisler
Depressive Deisler

5. Where’s the Hunger?

This is the long-term effect I was referring to above. By way of illustration, consider the fact that Sebastian Deisler spent most of last season out injured, depriving Bayern of the services of the most exciting young prospect in German football. His ailment? Depression. I have a feeling that depression, when it strikes Brazilian footballers at all, usually sets in only after they’re rich and famous and fat, and their careers are going off the boil as the tabloids pile on.

Call me essentialist, if you like, but I tend to think that there’s a certain class context to the production of soccer talent. Sure, great players can emerge from any class, but the general trend is that the combination of skill, strength, hunger and imagination that it takes to become a professional at the highest level is more prevalent among the more disenfranchised elements of society. A route out of povery, like boxing or basketball.

Watching kids start playing soccer here in the U.S. I’ve been struck by the fact that every kid brings their own ball. I’m pretty sure that when Ronaldinho was a kid in the favela, there was only ever one ball. And so when he managed to knick it off the feet of some rival, he quickly honed his abilities — the trickery, guile, exquisite ball control and the strength to ride out even the most brutal of playground tackles — to make sure he was going to keep that ball. Wait, we’re getting side tracked here.

My basic point being that Germany today is a kind of depressive middle class society, and its half century at the top of the global game may be coming to a close.

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Ten Reasons Why Oslo Failed

Posted on April 3, 2006 by Tony

I recently found this piece I wrote for TIME.com in October of 2000, trying to come to grips with the reasons for the failure of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. This was two months after Camp David, just as the Israelis were cranking up the spin machine to pump out the line that it failed simply because of deceit on Arafat’s part.

Rereading it now, a lot of it holds up, I think.

Extracts:

1. The Balance of Power

Throughout the peace process the Israelis metaphorically called the shots, because they literally called the shots. Their military and economic dominance and continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is almost as total today as it was when the Oslo Accord was first agreed in 1993 — as is the Palestinians’ absolute military weakness, diplomatic disadvantage and economic dependence. Arafat’s only real leverage has been to appeal to Washington, which has made no secret of its partiality to Israel. So, when the Palestinian leader found himself pushed by the U.S. to accept a deal on Jerusalem he regarded as political suicide, he simply hit the rewind button, restarting the intifada in the hope of changing the diplomatic odds…

2. History, Honesty and Might

The imbalance of power meant that Israelis and Palestinians weren’t forced into an historical reckoning. Israel’s military superiority allowed it to dictate terms that shielded Israelis from confronting the real price of a lasting peace with the Palestinians. And the denial and obfuscation of that reality by Yasser Arafat meant that ordinary Palestinians were never fully apprised of the terms of the deal he was making. Thus, until June this year Israel was insisting that its control over all of Jerusalem was non-negotiable, while Arafat was blithely telling everyone who’d listen that he was on track to get his coveted Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. Something was going to have to give.

Ehud Barak once remarked that if he’d been born Palestinian, he too would have joined a guerrilla organization. This is a profound observation on the part of an Israeli leader, and Israel has, to its credit, revised its high school history curriculum to examine some of its own history through Palestinian eyes, introducing young Israelis to the fact that the price of the birth of a Jewish state amid Arab hostility was almost 1 million Palestinian refugees. And after the conquests of 1967, a further 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza were ruled by Israel as an occupying army. Sadly, there’s little sign that the Palestinian leadership has done much thinking about how they might have responded to the circumstances the Jewish leadership encountered in 1948….

3. Is There a Referee in the House?

From the time the Oslo Accord first landed on his desk in 1993, President Clinton has made himself the exclusive mediator of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. But the U.S. was never a disinterested adjudicator of the conflict; it was deeply and openly committed to the Israeli side and hoped that by serving as both referee and coach to both sides it could conjure a paradigm-shifting agreement. But once both sides were forced to confront their most intractable differences at Camp David, Washington’s ability to mediate simply fell apart….

4. Weak Palestinian Leadership

Yasser Arafat’s unsentimental opportunism is probably the single most important factor in his political survival over three decades, and speaking out of different sides of his mouth comes naturally to a man who could go from Saddam Hussein’s town crier to feted White House guest in three short years. From the outset of Oslo, Arafat took in what he wanted to take in — and told his people what he thougt they wanted to hear — insisting to the end that he was on track to get all of the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as his capital. Not that his people were listening — despite the tawdry baubles of sovereignty flaunted by Arafat, the daily reality of the occupation was ever-present in the lived reality of West Bank and Gaza Palestinians, even after the Israelis withdrew to the edge of town. And the rampant corruption, cronyism and authoritarianism of Arafat’s administration simply deepened his people’s alienation from the peace process. Having failed to honestly relay the content of his negotiations with the Israelis to his own people, Arafat’s ability to deliver them for the peace process was always in doubt. The aging, ailing Arafat may have managed to hold the reins through a period of Palestinian despair and passivity, but if Palestinians are once again risen, as they have been in recent weeks, it’s unlikely that his leadership will survive — unless he completes yet another of his signature U-turns.

5. Weak Israeli Leadership

Unlike Arafat, the Israelis have to answer to an electorate — pity the Palestinian leader if he had to do the same! — and a sharply divided one. And that fact has bedeviled the peace process almost from the outset. …unlike his predecessor, who saw the need to bolster Arafat’s standing among his own people, Netanyahu was happy to humiliate the Palestinian leader at every turn. Three crucial years in which the Oslo framers had hoped would build the mutual trust necessary to tackle the most intractable “final status” issues were instead given over to continual crises and breakdowns.

Barak became the last hope for the peace process, but he had only a year in which to deliver; in addition, his predecessors hadn’t prepared Israelis for the scale of compromise required to conclude a deal. So once Barak broached the inevitable topic of compromising on Jerusalem, he found himself without a parliamentary majority. Regardless of his own leadership abilities and vision, simply surviving in power right now may force Barak to make common cause with Netanyahu’s party. Democracy, ironically, can be a major handicap for peacemakers.

6. Weak U.S. Leadership

It has to be said: President Clinton’s intentions have been good, but they may also have helped pave the road to an unhappy place. Measured by the standards of parenting, the President was all indulgence and not enough tough love….

7. Delaying the Hard Part

The architects of Oslo believed it was premature, in 1993, to try and reach agreement over questions such as the future of Jerusalem, the shape and nature of a Palestinian state, the status of Palestinian refugees abroad, the future of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories and even water rights. Instead, they designed a series of incremental steps toward peace, in which the Israelis would make three troop withdrawals — handing over certain powers to a Palestinian Authority that would guarantee Israel’s security — and in the process build up sufficient trust to go the hard yard. This assumed political continuities and an upward curve in goodwill. The size and scope of the withdrawals and nature of security arrangements were left to be negotiated along the way, and once the initial goodwill gave way to suspicion — and then when Israel elected a leadership openly committed to sabotaging Oslo — the open-ended, discretionary and incremental nature of the agreement meant that instead of building trust, it built resentment and suspicion, and turned almost every step in the process into a crisis or a showdown….

8. Vulnerability to Hard-liners

….Each side, in its own way, has brought the hard-liners back into play, diminishing the prospects for a revival of the peace deal.

9. Arab World Dynamics

…President Clinton has been able to rely on support from moderate Arab regimes when pressing Arafat to make concessions on issues of land and security. But Jerusalem is different. None of those Arab regimes has a particularly strong social base, and each faces a mounting challenge from Islamist elements who oppose any peace with Israel. Being seen to be endorsing Israel’s claim to sovereignty over the Islamic holy sites in East Jerusalem may have been political suicide for President Hosni Mubarak, King Abdullah and the Saudi royal family. And so when Clinton urged them to press Arafat to compromise on Jerusalem, they instead warned him against making any concessions….

10. Trust, Love and Hatred

OK, Israelis and Palestinians were never going to love each other, given their shared history. But the peace process was predicated on their ability to build mutual trust by exchanging land for peace. But the latest violence has revealed a level of mutual hatred that may ultimately paralyze both sides. Whether in the shooting of children, the lynching of unarmed prisoners, the sacking of religious shrines or the shelling of buildings, the level of violent mutual contempt suggests that these two peoples are incapable of anything more than a cold cease-fire; a bitter pill swallowed by each side in recognition of their inability to destroy the other. The “peace of the brave” hailed by Rabin on the White House lawn seven years ago was not born of the necessity of having fought to a standstill; it was an invitation to both peoples to reimagine themselves and their relationship to each other. But the hard realities of history and power precluded that. Now, they may once again be shaping up to fight themselves to a standstill.

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Posted in From Tony's Archive | 8 Comments

Fit to Print? The NY Times on Iraq

Posted on April 3, 2006 by Tony


Abdul Mahdi good; Jaafari bad, says
the paper of record. They should know

Sometimes, it’s hard to read the New York Times on Iraq without laughing out loud on the subway. First, there was Sunday’s editorial, which blithely parroted the Bush administration’s spin on the hapless Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari. “The head of the government is the ally of a radical anti-American cleric who leads a powerful private militia that is behind much of the sectarian terror,” it warned. Uh, yeah: Moqtada’s men do their share of sectarian terrorizing, no doubt, but so do the militia of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, whose candidate the U.S. (and the Times, by extension, in this editorial) are supporting to replace Jaafari. (And SCIRI, of course, like Jaafari, is also a close ally of the anti-American clerical establishment in Iran.)

But the Times editor marches disengenuously on: “One vital goal is to persuade the Shiites to abort their disastrous nomination of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Mr. Jaafari is unable to form a broadly inclusive government and has made no serious effort to rein in police death squads….If his nomination stands and is confirmed by Parliament, civil war will become much harder to head off.”

Oh. He’s unable to form a broadly inclusive government, is he? Does the Times really believe that the reason Iraqis can’t agree on a “broadly inclusive government” is because Jaafari won’t rein in the sectarian thugs of a police force that happens to be run by the militia loyal to his rivals in SCIRI, which the U.S. is now backing to replace Jaafari?

In a rant that might as well have been penned by Condi Rice, the Times notes that despite the sacrifices of Amreicans, “Shiite leaders have responded to Washington’s pleas for inclusiveness with bristling hostility, personally vilifying Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and criticizing American military operations in the kind of harsh language previously heard only from Sunni leaders.” Uh, um, well, exactly! (Maybe harshly criticizing the Americans will bring them closer together!)

“It was chilling to read Edward Wong’s interview with the Iraqi prime minister in The Times last week,” the editorialist continued, “during which Mr. Jaafari sat in the palace where he now makes his home, complained about the Americans (how dare he!) and predicted that the sectarian militias that are currently terrorizing Iraqi civilians could be incorporated into the army and police.” That kind of born-yesterday incredulity may be the kind of thing we’ve come to expect from Rummy and Condi, but not from the Times: Of course the militias will have to be incorporated into the Iraqi security forces. Who do you think makes up the best units of those security forces right now? And where else do you think the militias are going to go? You’d think the Times might at least be aware of the international trend in this respect, in which angry young men under arms are almost always incorporated into national armies and police forces as a way of drawing them into a new consensus. Jaafari’s position that the Times greeted with such outrage is simply common sense.

But the “born yesterday” ethos continued a day later with this delightful observation on why the U.S. is backing Adel Abdul Mahdi of SCIRI to replace Jaafari:
“Mr. Mahdi visited Washington last fall and was believed to have the backing of the Americans at the time. A rotund, bearish-looking man, he is a Western-educated proponent of free market economics, having disavowed earlier Maoist beliefs. He owns a house in the south of France, and American officials hope his exposure to the West tempers Islamist ideals honed by years in Iran.”

A Maoist-turned-free marketeer Islamist with a house in the south of France? Pretty clear where he’s coming from, then, isn’t it? A friend always laughs at the suggestion that exposure to the West moderates Islamist radicalism. “Haven’t they heard of Qutb?” he asks. (The father of the modern Islamist movement was radicalized by a sojourn in the U.S.) And the idea that having a residence in France may temper Islamist ideals honed by years in Iran seems oddly ironic when you consider that it was in Paris that Ayatollah Khomeini spent his years in exile. The truth is, nobody has any idea of what to expect from Abdul-Mahdi. He’s just another roll of the dice, and repeating the spin they’ve been spoonfed on him simply makes the Times sound as gormless as their sources.

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Nationalism vs. Globalization in the Jihadist Camp

Posted on April 3, 2006 by Tony

zarqawi
Not the face of Iraq’s insurgency

The news, if it proves true, that Musab al-Zarqawi has been forced to step down as the leader of a coalition of Jihadi groups in Iraq underscores a point made here last November: That by exporting terror operations into neighboring Sunni Arab states, Zarqawi was not only antagonizing an important support base of the Iraq insurgency, but also enfuriating his Baathist allies who depend on such regional support.

Writing immediately after the Amman hotel bombings attributed to Zarqawi, I noted: “Jordan has long been considered a relatively friendly entity as far as the Baathists are concerned — Saddam’s daughters took refuge there after the war, and remember, the late King Hussein refused to join the coalition in the 1991 Gulf War even though such key Arab states as Egypt and Syria actually sent troops to fight alongside the U.S. Jordan’s Palestinian majority, and its long-established economic ties with Iraq made it difficult for the Hashemite monarchy to side too openly with the U.S. in the invasion. Saddam has historically been very popular among Jordanians. And, it’s a relatively safe bet that the Baathists are taking full advantage of that history, and more importantly, of the growing misgivings in Amman over the fact that the U.S. has essentially authored a takeover in Baghdad by pro-Iranian Shiites…

“It’s quite conceivable that they’re running all sorts of clandestine financial and other logistical and support operations from Jordan. Antagonizing Jordanians and their government — and the wider Arab world — by sending suicide bombers into their capitals is anathema to the Baathist agenda, because it weakens the regional support that will be all-important to their ability to sustain the insurgency. The Baathists, if anything, will be looking to amplify the sympathy in Arab capitals for the plight of the Sunnis, because this will strengthen their position, both in the future political process (when the U.S. has to begin negotiating a new compact with the region) and also, their ability to raise funds and support in Arab capitals…

“The Baathists are unlikely to stand by and watch their own interests imperiled by those who would seek to make Iraq a new headquarters for terror attacks across the Middle East. Their objective, after all, is to restore some version of a regime detested by al Qaeda.”

The regional “export” of terror, as well as the grisly televised beheadings and the sectarian dimension of Zarqawi’s takfiri ideology that declares Shiites apostates, and therefore fair game — a position that drew public criticism even from Ayman Zawahiri — appear to have prompted even some of his jihadist allies in Iraq to downsize his role.

After all, the Sunni insurgents’ claim to regional support has never been greater, because of what the Arab regimes perceive as the turnover of Baghdad to proxies of Tehran. Allowing Zawahiri to be perceived as the leader of the “resistance” was counterproductive. Indeed, if the reports prove true, they’re an indication that the Sunni insurgency, even in its Islamist form, is insisting on its nationalist rather than transnational-jihadi character.

The implications of this shift correspond with an under-reported and -explored dimension of Islamist politics. Western news media and politicians often lump together all groups proclaiming Islamist ideologies as simply part of a global movement to restore Islam’s lost caliphate. But it’s far more complex than that, obviously, and there’s a fascinating — and strategically very important — distinction to be made between nationally-based political movements and insurgencies whose orientation and demands are national in character and the sort of Jihadi Comintern that Bin Laden and Zawahiri (and lately Zarqawi, too) have tried to create.

That distinction was highlighted, recently, when Zawahiri devoted one of his televised sermons to demanding that Hamas not compromise and continue to wage war on Israel. The rant was remarkable for the sense that it conveyed of the Qaeda leadership getting more and more anxious over the decision by Islamist movements to enter the mainstream: He had previously ranted against Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood engaging in peaceful demonstrations and entering parliamentary elections. And like the Brotherhood, which ignored his advice, Hamas publicly slapped down Zawahiri and said the Palestinians did not need al-Qaeda’s advice.

This dynamic may be one of the most important indicators out there, even though it’s being largely ignored by the Bush administration. That much is clear from the experience of Alistair Crooke and Mark Perry, who lead a team of retired U.S. and British intelligence professionals in a series of exploratory talks with leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Brotherhood recently in Beirut. They gained important insights into the nature and concerns of these movements and the prospects for achieving peace and political solutions to the conflicts in which they are engaged. Yet, even though the group was composed of longtime trusted intel operatives from their own side and allies, the U.S. government did not even accept the group’s offer of a debriefing, offering the rather infantile excuse that this would “legitimize talks with terrorists,” clinging instead to the feelgood but unhelpful insistence that such groups disarm and renounce violence before anyone can engage with them. (Where have the grownups gone, I sometimes wonder, watching the Bush administration’s conduct of national security policy.) Perry and Crooke respond:

“The question of legitimacy is important because for democracies, legitimacy is not conferred, but earned at the ballot box. Hamas and Hezbollah would welcome a dialogue with the West not because it would confer ‘legitimacy’ – they already have that – but because such a dialogue would acknowledge the differences between Islamist movements that represent actual constituencies from those (such as al-Qaeda and its allied movements) that represent no one….

“There is no question that two of the groups with whom we spoke – Hamas and Hezbollah – have adopted violent tactics to forward their political goals. They are not alone: Fatah (whose candidates for election the US supported with US$2 million in campaign funds) continues to use violence (and kidnap Westerners), so do the Tamil Tigers, so did the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the African National Congress. So too does the United States. America’s insistence that Hamas and Hezbollah ‘renounce violence’ and ‘disarm’ is dismissed by these groups as not only an invitation to surrender but, in light of the continuing and increasingly indefensible use of alarmingly disproportionate US and British firepower in Iraq, the rankest hypocrisy.

“The West’s seeming abhorrence of violence is derived from its deeply rooted belief that political change is possible without it. But defending this proposition requires an extraordinary exercise in historical amnesia….

“The leaders of major Islamist organizations view the issue of violence in the same way Americans do – as a legitimate option that is applied to establish deterrence and stability and to defend and promote their interests. For Hamas and Hezbollah, ‘armed resistance’ is a way of balancing the asymmetry of force available to Israel. Both groups place their use of violence in a political context.

” ‘Armed resistance is not simply a tool that we use to respond to Israeli aggression,’ a Hamas leader averred. ‘It gives our people confidence that they are being defended, that they have an identity, that someone is trying to balance the scales.

“Hezbollah puts this idea in the same political context: ‘It may be that some day we will have to sit down across from our enemies and talk to them about a political settlement. That could happen,’ reflected Nawaf Mousawi, the chief of the Hezbollah’s foreign relations department. ‘But no political agreement will be possible until they respect us. I want them to know that when they’re sitting there across from us that if they decide to get up and walk away, they’ll have to pay a price.’

“The West’s insistence that opening a political dialogue be preceded by and conditioned on disarmament is simply unrealistic: it suggests that we believe that ‘our’ violence is benevolent while ‘theirs’ is unreasoning and random – that a 19-year-old rifle-toting American in Fallujah is somehow less dangerous than a 19-year-old Shi’ite in southern Lebanon.

“In fact, political agreements have rarely been preceded by disarmament. United Nations demands for the disarmament of the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) in 1978 unraveled a conflict-ending political agreement (a situation put right when the rebels were allowed to keep their weapons), and Northern Ireland’s ‘Good Friday Agreement’ allowed the IRA to keep its weapons until a political process (leading to ‘decommissioning’) reflecting their concerns was put in place.

“The West often views Islamic violence as random and unreasoning, but Hamas and Hezbollah believe that violence can shift practical political considerations to create a psychology in which armed groups can use the tool of de-escalation as a way of forwarding a political process. That is to say, absent a political agreement, Hamas and Hezbollah will not voluntarily abandon what they view as their only defense against the overwhelming weight of Israeli military power.

“Disarmament (or ‘demilitarization’) is possible: it worked in Northern Ireland and South Africa. When coupled with substantive political talks, the unification of armed elements into a single security or military force – demilitarization – provides the best hope for increased stability and security in Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza.”

Indeed. But I fear the politics of adoloscent posturing that we’ve seen from the Bush administration on most of the complex issues such as Iran, North Korea and Hamas will preclude Washington from exploring the potentials that Perry and Crooke’s group appear to have identified.
***
Tags:; ; qaeda; ;

Posted in Situation Report | 9 Comments

Foul For Love

Posted on April 1, 2006 by Tony

bishara

The thing about chowhounding, is that sooner or later the New York Times always catches up and turns your favorite little outer-borough mama’s-kitchen haunts — that you either happened upon or were clued into by more energetic and committed chowhounds than yourself — into Zagat contenders. And so it comes to pass that Tanoreen, my hands-down favorite Palestinian restuarant in the world, has gotten its “Dining Out” moment. But its star, Rawia Bishara, shines so bright there was no way her establishment, even given it’s location in far-off Bay Ridge, was going to remain a secret for long.

I’m a fool for foul, that delectable paste made from mashed fava beans that would be a mainstay on any Cairene table (or so my Cairene culinary correspondent tells me — I’ve only had the pleasure in NYC). And nowhere haved I tasted foul as light, creamy and exquisitely spiced as at Tanoreen. That’s reason enough to go. But then there’s the lamb, umpteen different ways; and the fish… Her spice combinations are intriguing and intoxicating.

And there are other reasons to go, too. The conversations you’ll have with the lead waiter, a witty and charming fellow with film-star looks who, in his younger days, played as a fullback for Etoile d’Sahel, the Real Madrid of Tunisia.
And then there’s Ms. Bishara herself: Her stories of the life and culinary culture of her long-suffering people. Everything she does in the kitchen has its roots in the habits of her mother and aunts, and the wider Palestinian community of Nazareth.

Extracts from the Times piece:

” ‘They all knew exactly where their flour came from,’ she said of her neighbors, ‘and who made the finest cracked wheat burghul. They always got the best olive oil’ — originally from her grandparents’ groves, later, after government land confiscations, from whoever had the region’s famously lush green oil to sell.

‘Back then we even made our soap from olive oil,’ she added, ‘and in late summer all the rooftops were covered with tomatoes and figs cut in pieces, and tobacco and herbs like mint and zaatar put out to dry.’

To this day, the olive oil she uses at Tanoreen, her delightful small restaurant in Bay Ridge, comes from the West Bank, imported by a Chicago company, and her secret spice mixture, which she calls the foundation of her cooking, is roasted and ground for her back home in Nazareth.

The last time she was there she sent back about 55 pounds of it, she said. ‘When I use it with chicken, I might add a little more cumin,’ she continued. ‘When I use it with lamb, a little more coriander. But I always begin with my spices.’

“…But she looks to her late mother as a role model. ‘She was a school teacher with five kids to care for, but she was always cooking,’ Mrs. Bishara recalled. ‘When people had weddings, when they had funerals, they called my mother to make something, like stuffed artichokes or mousakhan.’

Mousakhan is the quintessential Palestinian dish, a savory, sumptuous banquet feast of whole chickens oven-roasted atop freshly baked Arab flatbread with lots of sweet onions and tart, deep-red sumac. Mrs. Bishara does a simplified version at Tanoreen, and she will do the real thing if it is ordered in advance.

Mousakhan apart, Palestinian cooking shares a lot with Jordanian and Lebanese cuisines, as well as with modern Israeli food. The use of exotic spices like cumin, sumac and dried rosebuds is balanced by an emphasis on sweetly pungent green herbs like parsley and cilantro, while the richness of olive oil, roasted almonds and pine nuts is offset by the prominence of flawlessly fresh vegetables and the bright tang of lemon.”

Thus the NY Times. I noticed that New York magazine had done its own review, and their advice to avoid overdosing on the starters is well taken. But what neither of the reviews prepares you for is the dessert: Just when you don’t believe you could eat another thing, out comes the waiter bearing what looks like a standard upside-down cake — but the force he applies when cutting through it’s crust of rosewater syrup, pistachio and crunchy vermicilli makes clear that it’s no cake: It’s a cheese, light, fluffy, baked. You know you shouldn’t, and you know you have to…

As the piece above notes, she’ll happily cater to your needs if you call your order in with sufficient lead time. She even catered my friend Azadeh’s book launch. And having tried my own hand at a traditional Iraqi iftar to break our fast on last Yom Kippur — cumin-lemony lentil soup with vermicilli noodles and minced-lamb-and-mint meatballs, with a fatoosh salad on the side (there is no better way to dispose of old pita breads than toasting them and then adding a dusting of sumac and a splash lemon vinaigrette in this otherwise simple salad) — come Pesach, I’m tempted to outsource the whole seder to her!

All I can say is that if Rawia Bishara does not write a book chronicling her recipes and the rich, often sad, but ultimately affirming history each dish and spice combinations carries, the world will be a sadder place.

Posted in Cuisine | 43 Comments

Death in the Afternoon

Posted on March 31, 2006 by Tony

Okay, time to start cranking up the World Cup output, updating the big picture with quick takes on all things mundial. This week:
cesc
Teen titan Cesc

1. Why I’m suddenly bullish on Spain — not to win, but perhaps to make the final four. The magic of Cesc Fabregas, and the selection dilemma he represents. Personally, as Liverpool fan, nothing has made me happier than the teenage genius’s eclipse of our own Xabi Alonso as the reigning Spanish midfield maestro in the Premiership (the reason being, of course, that this means Real Madrid will probably offer an irresistable 30 million or so to buy him rather than our Xabi). There’s no question Cesc has the maturity to conduct the Spanish midfield in Germany; my only question is what does Aragones do with Xabi? Can they play alongside eachother, or are they (like Lampard and Gerrard) both essentially trying to play the same role? Would you invite one to hold and the other to play the more advanced role? I don’t know, but it’s a good dilemma to have.

garcia
Golden Boot Garcia: Remember where you heard it first

But here’s my more outrageous prediction: Spain’s top scorer will not be Raul or Fernando Torres or even David Villa; it’ll be Liverpool’s very own Luis Garcia. (That hatrick for Spain in the qualifiers should have sounded notice.) He’s been easily the most deadly marksman at Anfield this year, scores with both feet, with his head, and even one beauty with his chest. I’d put $20 on him winning the Golden Boot, in fact! I know Spain are relentless under achievers, but I have a feeling things are going to click in Germany because of the infusion of new blood and creativity (Cesc, Xabi, Luis) alongside the likes of Raul. What will turn around Spain’s fortunes, this time, I think, is that so many more of their players are playing every week in the character-building cauldron of the English Premiership. Now if only they were managed by Rafa…

Posted in Glancing Headers | 9 Comments

Abu Mazen Offers a Punchline

Posted on March 23, 2006 by Tony

I’d never figured Mahmoud Abbas for Rupert Pupkin, but you’ve got to admire the guy’s material — and his exquisite comic timing. Latest example: The punchline he offered after Hamas presented him with its cabinet: “Yes, but Hamas has failed to acknowledge the primacy of the PLO, which is the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.”

If Pupkin was the King of Comedy, Abbas is its eternal prime minister.

Having failed dismally to persuade the Palestinian people to vote for his corrupt and decrepit party — and knowing that if he provoked a constitutional crisis by rejecting Hamas’s right to govern, he’d simply get himself unelected by the same voters — Abu Mazen has avoided taking on the challenge of rebuilding his party’s credibilty in the eyes of those is claims to represent; instead, he has turned to a bureaucratic shortcut worthy of any former Soviet satellite regime, by claiming that the democratically elected Palestinian government owes its legitimacy only to the fact that the unelected Palestine Liberation Organization negotiated the Oslo Accords with Israel, and that it is therefore obliged to recognize the PLO, as the UN did in 1974, as the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.

Cute, Mahmoud. Cute. The fact is that the UN recognized the PLO as the “sole legitimate representative of the PLO” in 1974, in order to protect the principle of Palestinian independence and sovereignty from two threats: The Israelis copying their South African allies and standing up their own stooges as “representative” of the Palestinians with whom they would then “negotiate”; and the Arab regimes of Jordan, Egypt or Syria negotiating the fate of the Palestinians as part of their own power-compacts with Israel. In 1974, there was no possibility of Palestinian sovereignty being expressed through democratic institutions. Today, the fact that the majority of Palestinian voters has chosen as their representatives an organization outside of the PLO makes nonsense of its claim to being the “sole legitimate representative”. And the warning by the PLO Executive Committee that Hamas will be diplomatically isolated if it fails to accept the primacy of the PLO will be greeted with raucous laughter among the Hamas leadership, which has been traveling the Middle East collecting pledges of support.

Indeed, as prime minister designate, Hamas’s Ismail Haniya had an equally cute response: “Hamas sees the PLO’s activity as an achievement, and has for many years attempted to gain entry to the organization and rebuild it in accordance with democratic foundations, but these attempts failed.” Indeed, Hamas sought to join the PLO a few years ago, but Yasser Arafat balked at their demand for 30 percent of the seats in its leadership structures. By current indicators, I’d say that seemed rather reasonable. Of course the PLO has traditionally represented the interests of not only West Bank and Gaza Palestinians, but also those of the Palestinian diaspora in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere. Then again, I don’t doubt that if you took a poll or conducted an election in the Palestinian diaspora, the results would not be very different from those recorded in January’s Palestinian Authority election.

Choice quote from Abbas’s supporting cast: Former Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei, who said “We cannot have a government that does not recognize the P.L.O.” Right. Perhaps the PLO will have to use all of its diplomatic clout to persuade the U.S., the EU and the Arab League to withhold funding to the Palestinian Authority until its government recognizes the authority of the PLO.

Posted in 99c Blogging | 4 Comments

Iraq is the 51st State

Posted on March 22, 2006 by Tony

saddam

1. It’s Official: Iraq is the 51st State

Amid all the Bush dissembling that marked the third anniversary of his Iraq invasion, it might be easy to forget that we got into this mess because the Democrats and the media were not prepared to challenge the Big Lie used to justify it. It was plain as daylight even four years ago that Iraq was absolutely no threat to the U.S. or to anyone else in the region, for that matter. (Today, too much of the media still seems to let Bush get away with claiming that the intelligence services of the world shared his assessment of the Iraqi threat: That, quite frankly, is a cow pat — yes, the intelligence services of the world may have had a similar assessment to that of the U.S. about what Iraq had in its arsenal. And on that basis, they deduced that Iraq was no threat, as did U.S. intelligence until the Duckhunter and the neocons began to lean on them to change the conclusions they were drawing from the same facts.)

Still, Bush seems to get very little by way of skeptical questioning when he offers a new palliative to suit the new situation: Even as he makes absolutely clear that U.S. forces will remain in Iraq after his presidency, he offers the seductive promise that “progress” is being made because Iraqi security forces are being deployed to replace their U.S. counterparts, which supposedly will allow them to leave. Now, if in social situations, we judge people not by what they say about themselves but by their behavior, then surely we should apply the same standard in the realm of politics? Although this idea of Iraqi forces deployment allowing U.S. forces to leave has been reported for months, there have been no signs in the behavior of U.S. forces in Iraq that the way is being prepared for a departure of its forces for the foreseeable future.

Handing over policing duties to allied Iraqi forces makes perfect sense for the U.S. military in Iraq. It lowers the profile of U.S. forces, makes them less vulnerable to casualties from guerrilla attacks, and reduces the daily friction that their presence causes among Iraqis. It will surely change both the size and the composition of the U.S. force required in Iraq, producing a significant reduction in troop levels and a greater reliance on air power. But that’s not the same as withdrawing. Michael Schwartz convincingly demonstrates that not only are the Iraqi forces being “stood up” by the U.S. deeply mired in Iraq’s sectarian tensions; they are wholly dependent on the U.S. military, fully integrated with it and under its command rather than answerable to Iraqi civilian politicians. Moreover, there is simply no national army capable of defending Iraq’s borders. No air force, no navy, no artillery or missile fleet, no significant armor. Nor are there any signs that plans are in the works to create such forces.

“You break it, you own it,” Powell allegedly told Bush. And there you have it: The U.S. destroyed Iraq’s national army, and with it the very basis of its ability to function as an independent state. Right now, the U.S. is the only force present in Iraq capable of defending its borders. If state power, sovereignty even, is defined by a monopoly on the means of force in a designated territory, then there isn’t really a state in Iraq today. There’s the U.S. military, and a series of ethnically and sectarian aligned militias.

The U.S. isn’t about to walk away and leave the borders of the country with the world’s second largest known oil reserves prey to the whim of Tehran or Ankara or Damascus or anyone else. That may be why when Kerry challenged Bush on the campaign trail to explain the 14 permanent bases the U.S. has begun building in Iraq and to declare that the U.S. has no desire to maintain a long-term presence in Iraq, Bush ducked the question. And has done so ever since. Nor has the U.S. media paid much attention to the question of why, if a withdrawal from Iraq is on the cards, Balad air force base near Baghdad boasts a Popeyes, a Subway, a Pizza Hut, a 24-hour Burger King and other features, both on this base and others, that make them resemble a slice of American suburbia? (Hertz seems to have spotted a marketing opportunity by opening up an outlet at one that rents out armor-plated sedans for off-base excursions.)

Americans wondering about base-closures in their home states ought not to be surprised: Perhaps those bases have simply been relocated to the 51st state.

2. Democracy and All That

Having failed to validate their case that Iraq had been a threat to the U.S. and its interests, the packaging of the mission was changed to reflect the priority of spreading democracy (all though Republicans are still allowed to get away with selling TV audiences the preposterous notion that “if we weren’t fighting them there, we’d be fighting them in our own cities” — how such a claim has been allowed to survive as a GOP talking point is testimony to the reluctance of TV anchors in the U.S. to slap down even the most palpably fallacious drivel when it’s spoken by senior politicians claiming the mantle of “national security.”)

Of course, spreading democracy in the Arab seems less appealing to the Administration now that the Palestinian and Egyptian elections have made abundantly clear that allowing the will of the people to prevail in the Arab world would almost certainly put the Islamists in power must about everywhere. But nowhere has the fruit of democracy been harder to swallow than in Iraq, where the ingrate electorate showed their contempt for U.S.-backed candidates (Chalabi didn’t win a seat; Allawi got less than 10 percent of the vote) and instead opted overwhelmingly for sectarian parties — in the case of the Arab majority, that meant the largest share of power going to Iran-backed Shiite Islamists, while the remainder went mostly to the Sunni Islamists aligned with the insurgency.

But the rules bequeathed by the U.S. has precluded anybody from forming a strong government, and they’re continuing to negotiate a complicated ethnic power sharing arrangement — the latest proposal is for a kind of power sharing council — that would supercede the democratically elected legislature.

Again, don’t be too harsh on the Bush administration. When the British and French designed their colonies — including Iraq — they deliberately cobbled together polities composed of diverse and often fractious populations. The internal divisions, they reasoned, made these populations easier to rule from abroad — or by a homegrown tyrant. With the tyrant, and the apparatus of tyranny, gone, the Iraqis are certainly not looking in a position to effectively rule themselves. Even though there is a consensus among upward of 80 percent of ordinary Iraqis that they want the U.S. forces to set a timetable for departing, the sectarian tensions and lack of power in the Iraqi central government make it unlikely that any one of Iraq’s political actors will manage to translate that sentiment into a challenge to the longterm U.S. presence. Indeed, what is most striking about the current political moment in Iraq is that far from simply dealing with the elected government (such that exists), the U.S. is negotiating over new political arrangements with hostile power centers that nonetheless have the ability to shape events in Iraq: the Baathist leadership of the insurgency; and the Islamic Republic of Iran. The fact of those talks speaks volumes about the real distribution of power in Iraq.

3. Paper Tigritude

“What’s the use of having this great military if we never use it?” Madeleine Albright once complained when the Joint Chiefs of Staff were warning against getting drawn into the sectarian conflicts of the Balkans. Well, Madeleine, if I may be so presumptuous as to venture an answer to your question, the use of not committing your military to missions impossible is that your adversaries tend to think it more powerful than it really is, and it acts as a deterrent to behavior you don’t like. But if you commit your forces and then fail to impose your will, as the U.S. has done in Iraq, your adversaries are emboldened by the limits to your military capability that have become apparent. (Why do you think Iran no longer fears a U.S. invasion?) In short, Iraq has overstretched the U.S. military and left it with plenty of rebuilding to do, and the rest of the world has observed that while the U.S. is capable of destroying any obstacle in its path, as an army of occupation it doesn’t do so well — to borrow Powell’s terminology, it’s not that good at owning the things it breaks.

But the display of the limits of U.S. power hasn’t been confined to the military sphere. Economically, the war has been a colossal drain on U.S. resources and deepened its debt (increasingly held by China, defined as a strategic competitor by the Bush administration). And the economic drain is likely to continue, not just as long as the open-ended U.S. military presence does, but also in the long-term multiplier effect pointed out by Joseph Stieglitz, in which the cumulative effects — such as absorbing the cost of long-term care to the tens of thousands of Americans left maimed by the war — will eventually pass $1 trillion.

Politically, the invasion — the choatic aftermath, and the consistent stream of images it has produced of U.S. abuses against Iraqis — has been grist to the mill for the jihadist cause worldwide. Essentially, the U.S. showed itself, in Arab eyes, to be behaving exactly as the “Crusader” caricature promoted by al-Qaeda predicted it would. Not only has that ensured Al Qaeda’s generational survival, already putting a new generation of global jihadists into the field in the way that Afghanistan did for its first generation in the 1980s, it has shifted mainstream Muslim opinion through the world decisively against the U.S. Today, the vast majority remain opposed to the terror tactics of al-Qaeda, but few quibble with its characterization of U.S. policies as innately hostile to Muslims. And to the extent that the political rupture the administration hoped to achieve in the established order in the Middle East has occurred, it has worked to the advantage of the Islamists long suppressed by U.S.-allied autocrats.

Former Bush administration State Department official Richard Haass has concluded that diplomatically, the invasion isolated the U.S. and diminished its influence. To talk of U.S. “leadership” today is to wax nostalgic, because most traditional U.S. allies, even are reluctant to follow the U.S. on a wide variety of policies. Iraq made it possible to say no to Washington and suffer no consequences. Today, even an ally as close as Britain sees itself obliged (as is clear in its handling of the Iran issue) to support Washington’s objectives even at the same time as its works to restrain and redirect Washington’s own pursuit of those objectives so as to avoid opening up new fronts.

The “forward leaning strategy of freedom” in the Middle East appears to have gone the way of all things that lean forward — if you lack balance, you fall on your face.

4. The Cost at Home

Stieglitz has done the analysis on the longterm multiplier draining effect on the economy, but the social impact is purely speculative. Martin Van Creveld, writing in the Israeli context and with reference to the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, has noted the corrosive effect on the social fabric of an industrialized society of the occupation of a poorer, weaker population. Even more scarily, Sven Lindqvist has shown in his “History of Bombing” how the cruelty practiced by European countries in their colonies in the late 19th and early 20th century set the state for the barbarities of World War II. The idea of simply dropping bombs on civilian population centers, which entered Europe at Guernica and became commonplace in WWII, originated with the use of those tactics by the British in Iraq and the Italians in Libya.

Now, we’re facing the prospect of tens of thousands of psychologically scarred people returning home from a place where their physical survival has been predicated on their quickness to violently eliminate potential threats. Inevitably, some of that violence will come home, be it in a domestic context or a wider social one. Many of those vets will be justifiably outraged at what they have experienced, and there’s no telling where that outrage will be directed. Hopefully into politics questioning the reasons they were sent to Iraq, and challenging the thinking that allowed it to happen. But I fear that in some instances, it may be a lot uglier. If the Gulf War begat Timothy McVeigh, I shudder to think what Operation Iraqi Freedom may yet have in store for America.

Posted in Situation Report | 5 Comments