Juan Cole writes this on his blog...
Pakistan Crisis and Social Statistics
Readers have written me asking what I think of the rash of almost apocalyptic pronouncements on the security situation in Pakistan issuing from the New York Times, The Telegraph, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in recent days.
And Stephen Walt also is asking why there are such varying assessments of Pakistan's security prospects. He suggests that one problem is the difficulty of predicting a revolutionary situation. But Pakistan just had a revolution against the military dictatorship! The polling, the behavior in the voting booth, the history of political geography, aren't these data relevant to the issue? Why does no one instance them?
As I have said before, although the rise of the Pakistani Taliban in the Pushtun areas and in some districts of Punjab is worrisome, the cosmic level of concern being expressed makes no sense to me. Some 55 percent of Pakistanis are Punjabi, and with the exception of some northern hardscrabble areas, I can't see any evidence that the vast majority of them has the slightest interest in Talibanism. Most are religious traditionalists, Sufis, Shiites, Sufi-Shiites, or urban modernists. At the federal level, they mainly voted in February 2008 for the Pakistan People's Party or the Muslim League, neither of them fundamentalist. The issue that excercised them most powerfully recently was the need to reinstate the civilian Supreme Court justices dismissed by a military dictatorship, who preside over a largely secular legal system.
Another major province is Sindh, with nearly 50 mn. of Pakistan's 165 mn. population. It is divided between Urdu-speakers and the largely rural Sindhis who are religious traditionalists, many of the anti-Taliban Barelvi school. They voted overwhelmingly for the centrist, mostly secular Pakistan People's Party in the recent parliamentary elections. Then there are the Urdu-speakers originally from India who mostly live in Karachi and a few other cities. In the past couple of decades the Urdu-speakers have tended to vote for the secular MQM party.
Residents of Sindh and Punjab constitute some 85% of Pakistan's population, and while these provinces have some Muslim extremists, they are a small fringe there.
Pakistan has a professional bureaucracy. It has doubled its literacy rate in the past three decades. Rural electrification has increased enormously. The urban middle class has doubled since 2000. The country has many, many problems, but it is hardly the Somalia some observers seem to imagine.
Opinion polling shows that even before the rounds of violence of the past two years, most Pakistanis rejected Muslim radicalism and violence. The stock of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda plummeted after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.
The Pakistani Taliban are largely a phenomenon of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas west of the North-West Frontier Province, and of a few districts within the NWFP itself. These are largely Pushtun ethnically. The NYT's breathless observation that there are Taliban a hundred miles from Islamabad doesn't actually tell us very much, since Islamabad is geographically close to the Pushtun regions without that implying that Pushtuns dominate or could dominate it. It is like saying that Lynchburg, Va., is close to Washington DC and thereby implying that Jerry Falwell's movement is about to take over the latter.
The Pakistani Taliban amount to a few thousand fighters who lack tanks, armored vehicles, and an air force.
The Pakistani military is the world's sixth largest, with 550,000 active duty troops and is well equipped and well-trained. It in the past has acquitted itself well against India, a country ten times Pakistan's size population-wise. It is the backbone of the country, and has excellent command and control, never having suffered an internal mutiny of any significance.
So what is being alleged? That some rural Pushtun tribesmen turned Taliban are about to sweep into Islamabad and overthrow the government of Pakistan? Frankly ridiculous. Wouldn't the government bring some tank formations up from the Indian border and stop them?
Or is it being alleged that the Pakistani army won't fight the Taliban? But then explain the long and destructive Bajaur campaign.
Or is the fear that some junior officers in the army are more or less Taliban and that they might make a coup? But the Pakistani military has typically sought a US alliance after every coup it has made. Who would support Talibanized officers? Not China, not the US, the major patrons of Islamabad.
If that is the fear, in any case, then the US should strengthen the civilian, elected government, which was installed against US wishes by a popular movement during the past two years. The officers should be strictly instructed that they are to stay in their barracks.
What I see is a Washington that is uncomfortable with anything like democracy and civilian rule in Pakistan; which seems not to realize that the Pakistani Taliban are a small, poorly armed fringe of Pushtuns, who are a minority; and I suspect US policy-makers of secretly desiring to find some pretext for removing Pakistan's nuclear capacity.
All the talk about the Pakistani government falling within 6 months, or of a Taliban takeover, flies in the face of everything we know about the character of Pakistani politics and institutions during the past two years.
My guess is that the alarmism is also being promoted from within Pakistan by Pervez Musharraf, who wants to make another military coup; and by civilian politicians in Islamabad, who want to extract more money from the US to fight the Taliban that they are secretly also bribing to attack Afghanistan.
Advice to Obama: Pakistan is being configured for you in ways that benefit some narrow sectional interests. Caveat emptor.
Showing posts with label juan cole.. Show all posts
Showing posts with label juan cole.. Show all posts
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Engaging the Muslim world
Juan Cole is asked 6 questions by Scott Horton about his new book Engaging the Muslim World.
Juan Cole is one of the nation’s leading historians focusing on the Middle East. Over the past decade he has emerged as a commentator on Middle East policy and a reliable source for new ideas that may enable the United States to pursue its foreign policy objectives more effectively in the region. For millions, his frequent posts at the Informed Comment blog provide a daily update on press accounts from the Islamic world, often including translations from Arabic- and Farsi-language sources in close-to-real time. His new book, Engaging the Muslim World, will be published on March 17.
1. What are the three biggest misperceptions Americans have about the global Islamic community?
Prof. Juan ColeOne: If you watch American television, you see the most extreme charges against Muslims set forth by pundits. Some allege that Muslims are inherently violent and commanded by scripture to attack infidels. In fact, the Quran forbids murder and commands Muslims to make peace with people who seek peace with them. The “infidels” whom the Quran urges the faithful to combat were the militant pagans of ancient Mecca, who had aggressively attacked the Muslims and were trying to kill them all. The Quran praises the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels as full of “guidance and light,” celebrates the children of Israel, and says that Christians are closest in love to Muslims. Of course, some Muslims are bigoted and manage to ignore those parts of their scripture, but it is not the case that the religion is essentially militant. I’ve gone with Americans to the Middle East, and after a few days they typically come and confess to me that they are amazed at how nice the people are, how kind and generous to foreigners, and how little they resemble U.S. media stereotypes.
Two: Many Americans seem to view the Muslim world as the new Soviet Union, as a relatively monolithic and uniformly hostile bloc of nations. This point of view seems to me oddly detached from reality. Turkey is a NATO ally, and Washington has designated Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait and Pakistan as non-NATO allies. Other governments of Muslim-majority countries, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen have offered the U.S. intelligence, security, and/or military cooperation of a high order. Aside from Europe, there is probably no other culture area on the globe where the United States has as many formal and informal allies. The only countries the United States has relatively severe differences with among nearly fifty Muslim-majority states are Syria, Iran, and the Sudan, and that sort of thing changes over time.
Three: Americans underestimate how beloved American culture is in the Muslim world. U.S. films, television programs, music, Internet programming, and politics are matters of huge public interest, especially among youth. All the polling shows that “they” do not “hate our way of life” at all. Rather, there is enormous interest in democracy, more individual freedoms, and in free market reforms. Muslim publics report deep dissatisfaction with U.S. foreign policy on Israel/Palestine, on Iraq and Afghanistan, and they say they dislike what they see as Hollywood sexual values. But the American dream is wildly popular, even (or especially) in Iran.
2. It is common to see the relationship between the North Atlantic world of Europe and North America on one hand and the Islamic world on the other framed in terms of energy policy—the conflict between the consumers and the producers. You suggest that this has driven the relationship since the middle twentieth century at least, and that it’s fundamentally unhealthy. Given the power of these economic facts, what’s the way to a more healthy and productive relationship?
In the Cold War, the U.S. blithely overthrew democratically elected governments in Syria and Iran to ensure Western European access to inexpensive petroleum, considered by elites in Washington, D.C., to be key to free market economic growth and to defeating the Communist bloc. Iran in particular never forgave the United States for this heavy-handed intervention. Going forward, the temptation to conduct further oil wars will be severe. Once the world economy recovers, demand will spiral up, and the discovery of new fields is unlikely to keep pace with that new demand, especially that of China, India, and other rising Asian powers with large populations.
But let us just allow market forces to operate, and put away the guns of mercantilism. If petroleum prices rise and there are shortages, that will be an impetus to develop mass transit, electric automobiles, and alternative sources of energy. Hydrocarbons as fuel are a dead end, and we need to move away from them as quickly as possible. The impact of burning them for energy on global climate is increasingly disastrous. But there is no quick fix here, and by 2050 we will be lucky to get a third of our energy from alternative sources. Solar energy is the only source that holds out hope of truly resolving the world’s energy problems. We need to cooperate with wealthy oil states such as the United Arab Emirates, who are, ironically, exploring the possibility of zero-carbon cities.
3. The mainstay of U.S. politics in the Middle East in recent years has been the relationship with Israel, but a secondary pillar has been the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia. The appointment of Chas Freeman, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, to head the National Intelligence Council is being portrayed as a tilt in favor of the Saudi relationship. What do you make of Freeman’s appointment and the vehement opposition it has drawn?
Freeman is a man of vast experience, both in the Middle East and East Asia, and he is a realist with excellent practical judgment, so having him in charge of the writing of the National Intelligence Estimates would be a great thing. It would be a shame if his clear-eyed view of the impact of Israeli expansionism on U.S. security should itself become an obstacle to his appointment, because of the influence of the Israel lobbies. But he will not be making policy with regard to Saudi Arabia. That task will fall to Hillary Clinton at the State Department and ultimately to Barack Obama.
Saudi Arabia is a special challenge for the United States. Its oil resources are the largest in the world, and its good will is indispensable to an industrialized country. It is too rich to ignore. It is too friendly to the United States to snub. It is too authoritarian and fundamentalist to embrace without qualification. It is too influential to sideline. Saudi Arabia has emerged as a diplomatic leader in the region, playing an important if understated role in Lebanon, Palestine, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and in negotiations with Iran. Although its diplomacy is often of the checkbook variety, the same thing could after all be said of the United States. Despite American trepidation about its hard line Wahhabi Islam, Saudi Arabia’s positions have generally aligned with those of Washington.
There is some good news. Saudi Arabia’s public and its elites have since 2002 taken the threat of terrorism increasingly seriously, once Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula began targeting Riyadh and Jidda. The kingdom has held municipal elections, and plans to move toward an elected parliament. The king just appointed the first woman minister and dismissed the head of the morals police for abuses. But Saudi Arabia’s absolute monarchy, its rigid form of Islam, its abysmal human rights situation, its gender apartheid toward women, and its role in spreading narrow-mindedness and xenophobia, require steady behind-the-scenes pressure from the U.S. More, not fewer, educational exchanges are desirable.
4. You say that constructive, measured withdrawal of troops from Iraq is the only way forward. Barack Obama is putting the United States on a 19-month course to withdrawal, but he’s also saying this is only a draw-down from military operations and suggesting that there may be a long-term military presence behind enormous fortified military installations. Grade the Obama plan.
I give Obama an “A” on his Iraq policy speech. It seemed to me to hit all the right notes. He thanked the U.S. troops for their valiant efforts and sacrifices. He pledged to abide by the express wishes of the Iraqi parliament. He tried to reassure U.S. allies in the Gulf, who are worried that in the wake of a precipitate U.S. withdrawal, Iraq might collapse and that the resulting conflagration might engulf them.
I don’t entirely agree with the above characterization of Obama’s Iraq plan, however. He did not suggest that there may be a long-term U.S. military presence behind fortified military installations in Iraq. He said firmly and clearly that he would withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq by December 31, 2011, in accordance with the Status of Forces Agreement passed by the Iraqi parliament last fall. I am not sure why his forthright declaration to this effect has been missed by so many observers.
It is true that he hedged a little on adherence to a strict timetable, but that is only common sense. If all hell broke loose in Mosul, with guerrillas fighting off the Iraqi Army and then beginning a massacre of the Kurdish or Christian population in the thousands, would the U.S. public really want Obama just to shrug and let it happen? If so, then why the demand for intervention in the Sudan to stop massacres there? As for keeping U.S. troops in Iraq to train and equip the new Iraqi Army, would that not be the only way to ensure that U.S. soldiers did not have to intervene to stop scenarios like the one I suggested at Mosul, above? The Iraqi military has demonstrated impressive new capabilities and esprit de corps in facing down the Mahdi Army in the past year, and that gives hope that the U.S. could honorably leave Iraq without fearing a security collapse in that country in the aftermath.
I understand the public anxiety that somehow Obama will renege on his pledge to get out of Iraq altogether, and it is important that we hold his feet to the fire on this issue, since the military-industrial complex will attempt to push him to remain. But nothing in his speech justified a conviction that he is already backtracking. After years of outright prevarication and fantastic policy pronouncements on Iraq by the previous administration, this frank and realistic speech struck me as a breath of fresh air.
5. The Obama plan for Afghanistan involves a substantial ramp-up of the U.S. presence coupled with what seems a more aggressive posture against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province—as shown by the now routine reports of attacks using predator drones. You previously criticized Bush’s policies in the area as being short-sighted with respect to both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Is the Obama plan an improvement?
Under Bush, Afghanistan and Pakistan suffered from neglect. Under Obama they may suffer from a surfeit of attention. To tell you the truth, I cannot understand what the mission is in Afghanistan any more. It is not to fight Al Qaeda there. I haven’t seen anything about U.S. troops engaging or capturing “Arab Afghans” for years. It appears that the U.S. and NATO are just trying to shore up the government of Hamid Karzai, which only controls thirty percent of the country. And what do we expect? That someday rural Pashtun Muslims will wake up and say, “I don’t mind foreign troops patrolling my country, I’m happy to be ruled by Tajiks and Hazara Shiites, and I’m not that interested in living by Islamic law anymore”? President Obama has spoken about fighting defeating the “Taliban,” but there seem to be four or five distinct groups now being called that, only one of them is Mulla Omar’s “Old Taliban.” And, I have a distinct sense of dread that some of the Pashtuns attacking NATO checkpoints are just disgruntled poppy farmers whose crops we burned down.
As for Pakistan, the demand that the government exert control over the Federally Administered Tribal Areas is frankly daft. I’ve been through that territory. You might as well demand that we exert control over all the rattlesnakes in New Mexico. And the conviction that the security of the U.S. mainland depends on the urban Pakistani government regimenting those rural clansmen makes no sense to me. Rugged areas where the government is weak are obviously possible havens for terrorists, but they also typically lack the infrastructure to enable major operations to be conducted directly from such territories. We’d be better off working with Pakistan to put in better airport security and computer tracking of people flying in and out. The Pakistani military has been fighting hard in Bajaur, one of the tribal agencies, against the Pakistani Taliban since August. They have had some success, but displaced 300,000 Pashtuns from their homes. That is going to settle the Pashtuns down?
6. Neoconservatives don’t seem to have lost their voice or their preoccupation with Iran and the Iranian nuclear program—as shown by John Bolton’s joking reference to Iran making a nuclear wasteland out of Chicago at the recent CPAC meetings. But you argue that there may be a way to engage Iran with less violence and bellicose rhetoric and more support for America’s natural allies in the Iranian population. What’s your policy prescription for President Obama, and what are the odds that Dennis Ross will accept it?
Never have so few been initially so powerful, in the event so wrong, and ultimately so discredited as the Neoconservatives. Why anyone would ever again pay the slightest attention to anything they say mystifies me. And I think the real onus is on Dennis Ross to demonstrate that he can be an honest broker.
The U.S. relationship with Iran is the most perilous area of U.S. foreign policy going forward. But there are actually only two bilateral issues between Washington and Tehran that put that relationship on the front burner. They comprise, first, Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment program, which the U.S. fears could veer toward dual use and result in a nuclear weapon. Second, Iran’s rejectionist stance toward U.S. ally Israel, and its support for the Lebanese Hezbollah and, allegedly, for Hamas in Gaza, are highly objectionable to the United States. I really don’t think there is any other really burning issue. Iran’s human rights policies are abominable, but not obviously worse than those of Vietnam, with which the U.S. has established good relations, or than those of Saudi Arabia, with which Washington is actively allied.
The nightmare is that relations deteriorate to the point where there is a war. Iran is over three times the size of France. It is three times more populous than Iraq. Conquering and occupying it would break America. A war with Iran could also cause dwindling U.S. troop contingents in Iraq to be cut off by Shiite militants and besieged. The entire NATO force in Afghanistan risks being trapped in that country if Iran mobilizes regional forces to isolate them in that craggy, landlocked country.
So since, to my mind at least, a war on Iran is unthinkable, the alternative is negotiations. I argue that we have to be realistic about what the Iranian elites they say they want. They say they do not want a nuclear bomb, but do want the ability to enrich uranium to run domestic nuclear reactors for energy. They already use half the petroleum they produce every day, and their economy and population are growing at such a rate that Iran may have no petroleum for export in the relatively near future. They say they are afraid that at that point, they will lose their independence and the U.S. will impose another puppet government upon them. The National Intelligence Estimate of 2007 assessed that the Iranians are not doing weapons-related research and that they do not have a nuclear weapons program. So it is at least plausible that they really are driven by a desire for energy independence, which should not be so hard for the U.S. public to understand.
In fact, they would be much better off if they gave up their enrichment activities and obtained an end to U.S. and United Nations economic boycotts, so that their enormous natural gas reserves could be developed. Moreover, their only real hope of energy independence in long term is solar, so that is where they should put their research energies.
If, as some suggest, the Iranians are engaged in enrichment because they want the appearance, at least, of being able to fend off a U.S. attack, then obviously one way to get them to close the program down is to give them credible guarantees against such an assault. That might have to be a multilateral undertaking, involving NATO, Russia and China. Congress needs to stop devoting millions every year to overthrowing the government in Tehran. Do Americans even know that we are doing that?
As for the Iranian involvement in the Levant, it is the Israelis who give the ayatollahs that opening and they could easily close it off. If they just gave back the Golan Heights to Syria in exchange for a Camp David-style peace treaty with Damascus, and gave back the Shebaa Farms occupied territory and made peace with Lebanon, they would deny Hezbollah its pretext for remaining armed and remove a key Hezbollah patron, Syria, from the equation. If they stopped blockading and half-starving the Gazans, ceased colonizing the West Bank and granted the Palestinians a state, Sunni, Christian, and secular Palestinians would not want or need Iranian money and arms.
Juan Cole is one of the nation’s leading historians focusing on the Middle East. Over the past decade he has emerged as a commentator on Middle East policy and a reliable source for new ideas that may enable the United States to pursue its foreign policy objectives more effectively in the region. For millions, his frequent posts at the Informed Comment blog provide a daily update on press accounts from the Islamic world, often including translations from Arabic- and Farsi-language sources in close-to-real time. His new book, Engaging the Muslim World, will be published on March 17.
1. What are the three biggest misperceptions Americans have about the global Islamic community?
Prof. Juan ColeOne: If you watch American television, you see the most extreme charges against Muslims set forth by pundits. Some allege that Muslims are inherently violent and commanded by scripture to attack infidels. In fact, the Quran forbids murder and commands Muslims to make peace with people who seek peace with them. The “infidels” whom the Quran urges the faithful to combat were the militant pagans of ancient Mecca, who had aggressively attacked the Muslims and were trying to kill them all. The Quran praises the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels as full of “guidance and light,” celebrates the children of Israel, and says that Christians are closest in love to Muslims. Of course, some Muslims are bigoted and manage to ignore those parts of their scripture, but it is not the case that the religion is essentially militant. I’ve gone with Americans to the Middle East, and after a few days they typically come and confess to me that they are amazed at how nice the people are, how kind and generous to foreigners, and how little they resemble U.S. media stereotypes.
Two: Many Americans seem to view the Muslim world as the new Soviet Union, as a relatively monolithic and uniformly hostile bloc of nations. This point of view seems to me oddly detached from reality. Turkey is a NATO ally, and Washington has designated Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait and Pakistan as non-NATO allies. Other governments of Muslim-majority countries, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen have offered the U.S. intelligence, security, and/or military cooperation of a high order. Aside from Europe, there is probably no other culture area on the globe where the United States has as many formal and informal allies. The only countries the United States has relatively severe differences with among nearly fifty Muslim-majority states are Syria, Iran, and the Sudan, and that sort of thing changes over time.
Three: Americans underestimate how beloved American culture is in the Muslim world. U.S. films, television programs, music, Internet programming, and politics are matters of huge public interest, especially among youth. All the polling shows that “they” do not “hate our way of life” at all. Rather, there is enormous interest in democracy, more individual freedoms, and in free market reforms. Muslim publics report deep dissatisfaction with U.S. foreign policy on Israel/Palestine, on Iraq and Afghanistan, and they say they dislike what they see as Hollywood sexual values. But the American dream is wildly popular, even (or especially) in Iran.
2. It is common to see the relationship between the North Atlantic world of Europe and North America on one hand and the Islamic world on the other framed in terms of energy policy—the conflict between the consumers and the producers. You suggest that this has driven the relationship since the middle twentieth century at least, and that it’s fundamentally unhealthy. Given the power of these economic facts, what’s the way to a more healthy and productive relationship?
In the Cold War, the U.S. blithely overthrew democratically elected governments in Syria and Iran to ensure Western European access to inexpensive petroleum, considered by elites in Washington, D.C., to be key to free market economic growth and to defeating the Communist bloc. Iran in particular never forgave the United States for this heavy-handed intervention. Going forward, the temptation to conduct further oil wars will be severe. Once the world economy recovers, demand will spiral up, and the discovery of new fields is unlikely to keep pace with that new demand, especially that of China, India, and other rising Asian powers with large populations.
But let us just allow market forces to operate, and put away the guns of mercantilism. If petroleum prices rise and there are shortages, that will be an impetus to develop mass transit, electric automobiles, and alternative sources of energy. Hydrocarbons as fuel are a dead end, and we need to move away from them as quickly as possible. The impact of burning them for energy on global climate is increasingly disastrous. But there is no quick fix here, and by 2050 we will be lucky to get a third of our energy from alternative sources. Solar energy is the only source that holds out hope of truly resolving the world’s energy problems. We need to cooperate with wealthy oil states such as the United Arab Emirates, who are, ironically, exploring the possibility of zero-carbon cities.
3. The mainstay of U.S. politics in the Middle East in recent years has been the relationship with Israel, but a secondary pillar has been the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia. The appointment of Chas Freeman, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, to head the National Intelligence Council is being portrayed as a tilt in favor of the Saudi relationship. What do you make of Freeman’s appointment and the vehement opposition it has drawn?
Freeman is a man of vast experience, both in the Middle East and East Asia, and he is a realist with excellent practical judgment, so having him in charge of the writing of the National Intelligence Estimates would be a great thing. It would be a shame if his clear-eyed view of the impact of Israeli expansionism on U.S. security should itself become an obstacle to his appointment, because of the influence of the Israel lobbies. But he will not be making policy with regard to Saudi Arabia. That task will fall to Hillary Clinton at the State Department and ultimately to Barack Obama.
Saudi Arabia is a special challenge for the United States. Its oil resources are the largest in the world, and its good will is indispensable to an industrialized country. It is too rich to ignore. It is too friendly to the United States to snub. It is too authoritarian and fundamentalist to embrace without qualification. It is too influential to sideline. Saudi Arabia has emerged as a diplomatic leader in the region, playing an important if understated role in Lebanon, Palestine, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and in negotiations with Iran. Although its diplomacy is often of the checkbook variety, the same thing could after all be said of the United States. Despite American trepidation about its hard line Wahhabi Islam, Saudi Arabia’s positions have generally aligned with those of Washington.
There is some good news. Saudi Arabia’s public and its elites have since 2002 taken the threat of terrorism increasingly seriously, once Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula began targeting Riyadh and Jidda. The kingdom has held municipal elections, and plans to move toward an elected parliament. The king just appointed the first woman minister and dismissed the head of the morals police for abuses. But Saudi Arabia’s absolute monarchy, its rigid form of Islam, its abysmal human rights situation, its gender apartheid toward women, and its role in spreading narrow-mindedness and xenophobia, require steady behind-the-scenes pressure from the U.S. More, not fewer, educational exchanges are desirable.
4. You say that constructive, measured withdrawal of troops from Iraq is the only way forward. Barack Obama is putting the United States on a 19-month course to withdrawal, but he’s also saying this is only a draw-down from military operations and suggesting that there may be a long-term military presence behind enormous fortified military installations. Grade the Obama plan.
I give Obama an “A” on his Iraq policy speech. It seemed to me to hit all the right notes. He thanked the U.S. troops for their valiant efforts and sacrifices. He pledged to abide by the express wishes of the Iraqi parliament. He tried to reassure U.S. allies in the Gulf, who are worried that in the wake of a precipitate U.S. withdrawal, Iraq might collapse and that the resulting conflagration might engulf them.
I don’t entirely agree with the above characterization of Obama’s Iraq plan, however. He did not suggest that there may be a long-term U.S. military presence behind fortified military installations in Iraq. He said firmly and clearly that he would withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq by December 31, 2011, in accordance with the Status of Forces Agreement passed by the Iraqi parliament last fall. I am not sure why his forthright declaration to this effect has been missed by so many observers.
It is true that he hedged a little on adherence to a strict timetable, but that is only common sense. If all hell broke loose in Mosul, with guerrillas fighting off the Iraqi Army and then beginning a massacre of the Kurdish or Christian population in the thousands, would the U.S. public really want Obama just to shrug and let it happen? If so, then why the demand for intervention in the Sudan to stop massacres there? As for keeping U.S. troops in Iraq to train and equip the new Iraqi Army, would that not be the only way to ensure that U.S. soldiers did not have to intervene to stop scenarios like the one I suggested at Mosul, above? The Iraqi military has demonstrated impressive new capabilities and esprit de corps in facing down the Mahdi Army in the past year, and that gives hope that the U.S. could honorably leave Iraq without fearing a security collapse in that country in the aftermath.
I understand the public anxiety that somehow Obama will renege on his pledge to get out of Iraq altogether, and it is important that we hold his feet to the fire on this issue, since the military-industrial complex will attempt to push him to remain. But nothing in his speech justified a conviction that he is already backtracking. After years of outright prevarication and fantastic policy pronouncements on Iraq by the previous administration, this frank and realistic speech struck me as a breath of fresh air.
5. The Obama plan for Afghanistan involves a substantial ramp-up of the U.S. presence coupled with what seems a more aggressive posture against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province—as shown by the now routine reports of attacks using predator drones. You previously criticized Bush’s policies in the area as being short-sighted with respect to both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Is the Obama plan an improvement?
Under Bush, Afghanistan and Pakistan suffered from neglect. Under Obama they may suffer from a surfeit of attention. To tell you the truth, I cannot understand what the mission is in Afghanistan any more. It is not to fight Al Qaeda there. I haven’t seen anything about U.S. troops engaging or capturing “Arab Afghans” for years. It appears that the U.S. and NATO are just trying to shore up the government of Hamid Karzai, which only controls thirty percent of the country. And what do we expect? That someday rural Pashtun Muslims will wake up and say, “I don’t mind foreign troops patrolling my country, I’m happy to be ruled by Tajiks and Hazara Shiites, and I’m not that interested in living by Islamic law anymore”? President Obama has spoken about fighting defeating the “Taliban,” but there seem to be four or five distinct groups now being called that, only one of them is Mulla Omar’s “Old Taliban.” And, I have a distinct sense of dread that some of the Pashtuns attacking NATO checkpoints are just disgruntled poppy farmers whose crops we burned down.
As for Pakistan, the demand that the government exert control over the Federally Administered Tribal Areas is frankly daft. I’ve been through that territory. You might as well demand that we exert control over all the rattlesnakes in New Mexico. And the conviction that the security of the U.S. mainland depends on the urban Pakistani government regimenting those rural clansmen makes no sense to me. Rugged areas where the government is weak are obviously possible havens for terrorists, but they also typically lack the infrastructure to enable major operations to be conducted directly from such territories. We’d be better off working with Pakistan to put in better airport security and computer tracking of people flying in and out. The Pakistani military has been fighting hard in Bajaur, one of the tribal agencies, against the Pakistani Taliban since August. They have had some success, but displaced 300,000 Pashtuns from their homes. That is going to settle the Pashtuns down?
6. Neoconservatives don’t seem to have lost their voice or their preoccupation with Iran and the Iranian nuclear program—as shown by John Bolton’s joking reference to Iran making a nuclear wasteland out of Chicago at the recent CPAC meetings. But you argue that there may be a way to engage Iran with less violence and bellicose rhetoric and more support for America’s natural allies in the Iranian population. What’s your policy prescription for President Obama, and what are the odds that Dennis Ross will accept it?
Never have so few been initially so powerful, in the event so wrong, and ultimately so discredited as the Neoconservatives. Why anyone would ever again pay the slightest attention to anything they say mystifies me. And I think the real onus is on Dennis Ross to demonstrate that he can be an honest broker.
The U.S. relationship with Iran is the most perilous area of U.S. foreign policy going forward. But there are actually only two bilateral issues between Washington and Tehran that put that relationship on the front burner. They comprise, first, Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment program, which the U.S. fears could veer toward dual use and result in a nuclear weapon. Second, Iran’s rejectionist stance toward U.S. ally Israel, and its support for the Lebanese Hezbollah and, allegedly, for Hamas in Gaza, are highly objectionable to the United States. I really don’t think there is any other really burning issue. Iran’s human rights policies are abominable, but not obviously worse than those of Vietnam, with which the U.S. has established good relations, or than those of Saudi Arabia, with which Washington is actively allied.
The nightmare is that relations deteriorate to the point where there is a war. Iran is over three times the size of France. It is three times more populous than Iraq. Conquering and occupying it would break America. A war with Iran could also cause dwindling U.S. troop contingents in Iraq to be cut off by Shiite militants and besieged. The entire NATO force in Afghanistan risks being trapped in that country if Iran mobilizes regional forces to isolate them in that craggy, landlocked country.
So since, to my mind at least, a war on Iran is unthinkable, the alternative is negotiations. I argue that we have to be realistic about what the Iranian elites they say they want. They say they do not want a nuclear bomb, but do want the ability to enrich uranium to run domestic nuclear reactors for energy. They already use half the petroleum they produce every day, and their economy and population are growing at such a rate that Iran may have no petroleum for export in the relatively near future. They say they are afraid that at that point, they will lose their independence and the U.S. will impose another puppet government upon them. The National Intelligence Estimate of 2007 assessed that the Iranians are not doing weapons-related research and that they do not have a nuclear weapons program. So it is at least plausible that they really are driven by a desire for energy independence, which should not be so hard for the U.S. public to understand.
In fact, they would be much better off if they gave up their enrichment activities and obtained an end to U.S. and United Nations economic boycotts, so that their enormous natural gas reserves could be developed. Moreover, their only real hope of energy independence in long term is solar, so that is where they should put their research energies.
If, as some suggest, the Iranians are engaged in enrichment because they want the appearance, at least, of being able to fend off a U.S. attack, then obviously one way to get them to close the program down is to give them credible guarantees against such an assault. That might have to be a multilateral undertaking, involving NATO, Russia and China. Congress needs to stop devoting millions every year to overthrowing the government in Tehran. Do Americans even know that we are doing that?
As for the Iranian involvement in the Levant, it is the Israelis who give the ayatollahs that opening and they could easily close it off. If they just gave back the Golan Heights to Syria in exchange for a Camp David-style peace treaty with Damascus, and gave back the Shebaa Farms occupied territory and made peace with Lebanon, they would deny Hezbollah its pretext for remaining armed and remove a key Hezbollah patron, Syria, from the equation. If they stopped blockading and half-starving the Gazans, ceased colonizing the West Bank and granted the Palestinians a state, Sunni, Christian, and secular Palestinians would not want or need Iranian money and arms.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
The perils of inheriting a war
Juan Cole on Obama's first move to bomb villages in Wazirstan.
Jan. 26, 2009 | On Friday, President Barack Obama ordered an Air Force drone to bomb two separate Pakistani villages, killing what Pakistani officials said were 22 individuals, including between four and seven foreign fighters. Many of Obama's initiatives in his first few days in office -- preparing to depart Iraq, ending torture and closing Guantánamo -- were aimed at signaling a sharp turn away from Bush administration policies. In contrast, the headline about the strike in Waziristan could as easily have appeared in December with "President Bush" substituted for "President Obama." Pundits are already worrying that Obama may be falling into the Lyndon Johnson Vietnam trap, of escalating a predecessor's halfhearted war into a major quagmire. What does Obama's first military operation tell us about his administration's priorities?
Obama's first meeting with his team on national security issues focused on Afghanistan and Pakistan, in the course of which the new president is reported to have endorsed the drone attacks. Friday's were the first major U.S. airstrikes on Pakistani territory since Jan. 1, because the Pakistan Taliban Movement in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) had launched a campaign to discover local informants for the Central Intelligence Agency, killing 40 of them. The two cells the U.S. hit are accused of raiding over the border into Afghanistan, lending support to the Taliban there.
The tribal notable Khalil Dawar, who lived near the village of Mir Ali in Pakistan's North Waziristan Agency, hosted a party of five alleged al-Qaida operatives in the guesthouse on his property. An American drone hit the site with three Hellfire missiles. According to the Pakistani press, the strike not only killed the four Arab fighters and a Punjabi militant, but also the Pashtun host and some of his family members. A few hours later, missiles slammed into another residence near the village of Wana in a nearby tribal agency, South Waziristan, killing 10. Pakistani sources disagreed over whether there had been any foreign fighters at all at the second target, with locals claiming that 10 family members, including women and children, were the only victims. Villagers in Pakistan's northwestern tribal belt sometimes rent to the Arab fighters because they are sympathetic to their struggle, but sometimes they just need the money.
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The U.S. committed itself, when it overthrew the largely Pashtun Taliban in 2001, to building up a new government in Afghanistan and restoring the country to stability. The new government of President Hamid Karzai, however, was viewed as disproportionately benefiting northern ethnic groups such as the Tajiks, Hazara and Uzbeks. NATO search and destroy missions in the ethnically Pashtun south of the country alienated villagers, as did forcible eradication of lucrative poppy crops. The Taliban revived, and new groups emerged allied with them, turning to suicide bombings and attacks on the new Afghan army and on NATO and U.S. troops. Obama has committed to dealing with this problem by increasing the size of the U.S. and NATO troop contingent in Afghanistan, which already stands at more than 50,000, but the plan is facing stiff resistance from NATO allies and their publics.
Sandwiched between the lush river-fed plains of Pakistan and the deserts and mountains of southern Afghanistan, the 13 Federally Administered Tribal Areas are a no-man's land that is technically part of Pakistan but seldom truly controlled by Islamabad. Ethnically, the inhabitants are Pashtuns, the same group that dominates southern Afghanistan, and many of them deeply sympathize with those Afghan neighbors who are fighting Western troops and the Karzai government. In recent years, tribal and village organizations in FATA have been shunted aside by Muslim radicals who formed the Pakistan Taliban movement, emulating the Taliban of Afghanistan. They not only raid into southern Afghanistan but have also committed terrorist acts in Pakistani cities such as Peshawar and Islamabad.
The Bush administration launched 30 air attacks on targets in Pakistan in 2008, killing 220 persons. The strikes seem to have started in the summer, during the presidential campaign, about a year after candidate Obama began urging this policy. Bush may have instituted the aerial attacks to deny Obama a campaign talking point and to prevent him from out-hawking John McCain. That is, Obama may have pushed Bush -- who had earlier been wary of alienating Pakistan -- to the right. The American bombing of the tribal areas occurs with tacit Pakistani government acquiescence as a result of a secret agreement reached last September, despite the sometimes vehement public denunciations that Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani issues after they've occurred.
Jan. 26, 2009 | On Friday, President Barack Obama ordered an Air Force drone to bomb two separate Pakistani villages, killing what Pakistani officials said were 22 individuals, including between four and seven foreign fighters. Many of Obama's initiatives in his first few days in office -- preparing to depart Iraq, ending torture and closing Guantánamo -- were aimed at signaling a sharp turn away from Bush administration policies. In contrast, the headline about the strike in Waziristan could as easily have appeared in December with "President Bush" substituted for "President Obama." Pundits are already worrying that Obama may be falling into the Lyndon Johnson Vietnam trap, of escalating a predecessor's halfhearted war into a major quagmire. What does Obama's first military operation tell us about his administration's priorities?
Obama's first meeting with his team on national security issues focused on Afghanistan and Pakistan, in the course of which the new president is reported to have endorsed the drone attacks. Friday's were the first major U.S. airstrikes on Pakistani territory since Jan. 1, because the Pakistan Taliban Movement in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) had launched a campaign to discover local informants for the Central Intelligence Agency, killing 40 of them. The two cells the U.S. hit are accused of raiding over the border into Afghanistan, lending support to the Taliban there.
The tribal notable Khalil Dawar, who lived near the village of Mir Ali in Pakistan's North Waziristan Agency, hosted a party of five alleged al-Qaida operatives in the guesthouse on his property. An American drone hit the site with three Hellfire missiles. According to the Pakistani press, the strike not only killed the four Arab fighters and a Punjabi militant, but also the Pashtun host and some of his family members. A few hours later, missiles slammed into another residence near the village of Wana in a nearby tribal agency, South Waziristan, killing 10. Pakistani sources disagreed over whether there had been any foreign fighters at all at the second target, with locals claiming that 10 family members, including women and children, were the only victims. Villagers in Pakistan's northwestern tribal belt sometimes rent to the Arab fighters because they are sympathetic to their struggle, but sometimes they just need the money.
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The U.S. committed itself, when it overthrew the largely Pashtun Taliban in 2001, to building up a new government in Afghanistan and restoring the country to stability. The new government of President Hamid Karzai, however, was viewed as disproportionately benefiting northern ethnic groups such as the Tajiks, Hazara and Uzbeks. NATO search and destroy missions in the ethnically Pashtun south of the country alienated villagers, as did forcible eradication of lucrative poppy crops. The Taliban revived, and new groups emerged allied with them, turning to suicide bombings and attacks on the new Afghan army and on NATO and U.S. troops. Obama has committed to dealing with this problem by increasing the size of the U.S. and NATO troop contingent in Afghanistan, which already stands at more than 50,000, but the plan is facing stiff resistance from NATO allies and their publics.
Sandwiched between the lush river-fed plains of Pakistan and the deserts and mountains of southern Afghanistan, the 13 Federally Administered Tribal Areas are a no-man's land that is technically part of Pakistan but seldom truly controlled by Islamabad. Ethnically, the inhabitants are Pashtuns, the same group that dominates southern Afghanistan, and many of them deeply sympathize with those Afghan neighbors who are fighting Western troops and the Karzai government. In recent years, tribal and village organizations in FATA have been shunted aside by Muslim radicals who formed the Pakistan Taliban movement, emulating the Taliban of Afghanistan. They not only raid into southern Afghanistan but have also committed terrorist acts in Pakistani cities such as Peshawar and Islamabad.
The Bush administration launched 30 air attacks on targets in Pakistan in 2008, killing 220 persons. The strikes seem to have started in the summer, during the presidential campaign, about a year after candidate Obama began urging this policy. Bush may have instituted the aerial attacks to deny Obama a campaign talking point and to prevent him from out-hawking John McCain. That is, Obama may have pushed Bush -- who had earlier been wary of alienating Pakistan -- to the right. The American bombing of the tribal areas occurs with tacit Pakistani government acquiescence as a result of a secret agreement reached last September, despite the sometimes vehement public denunciations that Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani issues after they've occurred.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Juan Cole on Gaza
Juan Cole talks about the demonstrations going on in Europe, the Middle East and Washington DC.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Massive Protests in London, Barcelona
Some videoblogging for a snowy Sunday (where I am).
Israel renewed its strikes and shelling against targets in densely-populated Gaza on Sunday morning. Some 850 Gazans and 13 Israelis have been killed in the fighting.
Cameraman films death of younger brother (CNN). Warning: graphic:
Aljazeera English gives voice to the children and other innocent victimes of the Israeli attack on Gaza. (Graphic).
There was a little-covered demonstration in Washington DC that addressed president-elect Obama and asked for a change in policy.
A protest culture around Gaza is growing up in the West of some sophistication, as exemplified in this professional and touching performance by musician Michael Heart :
A wave of street protests swept Europe and the Middle East on Saturday. Personally, I don't think these events are very effective, though they can help with networking and social solidarity. They won't cause significant changes in Israeli policy. Setting up an effective counter to the Israel and military-industrial lobbies on Capitol Hill, now that would make a big difference.
Still, the scale of the protests is breathtaking.
100,000 protesters came out in London on Sunday against Israel's war on the civilians of Gaza.
About 20,000 protested in front of the Israeli embassy, and some elements of that crowd became unruly, as this video from ITN explains:
BBC has video of how things went bad in that particular section of the event.. The announcer noticed British Jews and even expatriate Israelis at the rally, who joined in disgust at what the Israeli government is doing.
Singer Annie Lennox was among the speakers on Saturday:
She called what is happening a genocide. If one thinks of genocide as large numbers of people being killed, as in Rwanda or Cambodia, then her terminology seems exaggerated. But a case could be made that she used the right word.
Contemporary international legal thinking on genocide does consider destroy the lifeways of a people to be in this category. Here is the UN definition:
' In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part . . . '
That what the Israeli governmentis doing is intended to destroy in part the Palestinians as an independent people seems to me incontestable.
Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz considered what Saddam Hussein did to the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq in draining their swamps and expelling them to slums around Basra and Amara to be one of the reasons an Iraq War needed to be fought. I can't see any particular difference between what Saddam did to the Marsh Arabs and what Israel did to the Palestinians who became refugees in Gaza and who are now under bombardment again.
At our Global Affairs blog, see the columns on Gaza by Dick Norton and Farideh Farhi; Farhi's is "Israel, Gaza War, Return of “Emboldened Iran,” and Obama."
Jean-Baptiste Gallopin argues in a French op-ed for Liberation that the Israelis are destroying the civic infrastructure of Gaza, including police stations and municipal buildings, that will ensure that chaos reigns when Israeli troops withdraw. He is right. None of us can understand why a country would want to create chaos right on its borders.
Prominent British Jews are calling for a ceasefire.
David Rose has discovered documents demonstrating that the summer, 2007 break of Fatah with Hamas was orchestrated by the Bush administration after the two had finally achieved a national unity government that January. The plan was later doctored to make it look like it was all coming from Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas.
For other takes on Gaza see Helena Cobban, Marc Lynch, and Joshua Landis, among others (see my Friends and Interlocutors on the right).
------
Oooops, this part of the first draft of the posting was an older video coming out of an operation in Bethlehem. Sorry for the error.
CBC reports on Israeli military killing of civilians with Israeli army footage that Israeli television leaked. It shows the killing of a mother of two. There is touching footage of a young girl trying not to show the enemy her tears. Israeli soldiers appear to have delayed an ambulance from coming in time to save her. One of the Israeli soldiers says "I don't know what we are doing here. Purification maybe. It's dirty here. I don't know why a good Hebrew boy should be here so far from his home."
posted by Juan Cole @ 1/11/2009 12:00:00 PM
18 Comments:
At 3:26 AM, werkshop said...
The 'civilized world' is watching a brutal and violent action purportedly being done for the sake of peace.
There is something very, very wrong with this picture
At 3:33 AM, james speaks said...
"None of us can understand why a country would want to create chaos right on its borders."
Incomprehensible only if one thinks of the leaders as thinking, responsible adults.
Remove the thinking part, say, by appeals only to emotion and self-serving pseudo-logical mantras, then one is left with only responsible adults.
Remove the responsible part with frequent and persistent maneuvers that always shift blame onto the Palestinians, then one is left without responsible adults.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Massive Protests in London, Barcelona
Some videoblogging for a snowy Sunday (where I am).
Israel renewed its strikes and shelling against targets in densely-populated Gaza on Sunday morning. Some 850 Gazans and 13 Israelis have been killed in the fighting.
Cameraman films death of younger brother (CNN). Warning: graphic:
Aljazeera English gives voice to the children and other innocent victimes of the Israeli attack on Gaza. (Graphic).
There was a little-covered demonstration in Washington DC that addressed president-elect Obama and asked for a change in policy.
A protest culture around Gaza is growing up in the West of some sophistication, as exemplified in this professional and touching performance by musician Michael Heart :
A wave of street protests swept Europe and the Middle East on Saturday. Personally, I don't think these events are very effective, though they can help with networking and social solidarity. They won't cause significant changes in Israeli policy. Setting up an effective counter to the Israel and military-industrial lobbies on Capitol Hill, now that would make a big difference.
Still, the scale of the protests is breathtaking.
100,000 protesters came out in London on Sunday against Israel's war on the civilians of Gaza.
About 20,000 protested in front of the Israeli embassy, and some elements of that crowd became unruly, as this video from ITN explains:
BBC has video of how things went bad in that particular section of the event.. The announcer noticed British Jews and even expatriate Israelis at the rally, who joined in disgust at what the Israeli government is doing.
Singer Annie Lennox was among the speakers on Saturday:
She called what is happening a genocide. If one thinks of genocide as large numbers of people being killed, as in Rwanda or Cambodia, then her terminology seems exaggerated. But a case could be made that she used the right word.
Contemporary international legal thinking on genocide does consider destroy the lifeways of a people to be in this category. Here is the UN definition:
' In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part . . . '
That what the Israeli governmentis doing is intended to destroy in part the Palestinians as an independent people seems to me incontestable.
Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz considered what Saddam Hussein did to the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq in draining their swamps and expelling them to slums around Basra and Amara to be one of the reasons an Iraq War needed to be fought. I can't see any particular difference between what Saddam did to the Marsh Arabs and what Israel did to the Palestinians who became refugees in Gaza and who are now under bombardment again.
At our Global Affairs blog, see the columns on Gaza by Dick Norton and Farideh Farhi; Farhi's is "Israel, Gaza War, Return of “Emboldened Iran,” and Obama."
Jean-Baptiste Gallopin argues in a French op-ed for Liberation that the Israelis are destroying the civic infrastructure of Gaza, including police stations and municipal buildings, that will ensure that chaos reigns when Israeli troops withdraw. He is right. None of us can understand why a country would want to create chaos right on its borders.
Prominent British Jews are calling for a ceasefire.
David Rose has discovered documents demonstrating that the summer, 2007 break of Fatah with Hamas was orchestrated by the Bush administration after the two had finally achieved a national unity government that January. The plan was later doctored to make it look like it was all coming from Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas.
For other takes on Gaza see Helena Cobban, Marc Lynch, and Joshua Landis, among others (see my Friends and Interlocutors on the right).
------
Oooops, this part of the first draft of the posting was an older video coming out of an operation in Bethlehem. Sorry for the error.
CBC reports on Israeli military killing of civilians with Israeli army footage that Israeli television leaked. It shows the killing of a mother of two. There is touching footage of a young girl trying not to show the enemy her tears. Israeli soldiers appear to have delayed an ambulance from coming in time to save her. One of the Israeli soldiers says "I don't know what we are doing here. Purification maybe. It's dirty here. I don't know why a good Hebrew boy should be here so far from his home."
posted by Juan Cole @ 1/11/2009 12:00:00 PM
18 Comments:
At 3:26 AM, werkshop said...
The 'civilized world' is watching a brutal and violent action purportedly being done for the sake of peace.
There is something very, very wrong with this picture
At 3:33 AM, james speaks said...
"None of us can understand why a country would want to create chaos right on its borders."
Incomprehensible only if one thinks of the leaders as thinking, responsible adults.
Remove the thinking part, say, by appeals only to emotion and self-serving pseudo-logical mantras, then one is left with only responsible adults.
Remove the responsible part with frequent and persistent maneuvers that always shift blame onto the Palestinians, then one is left without responsible adults.
Sunday, January 04, 2009
Juan Cole on Israel's micro and macro wars
With regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict, we have entered the age of micro-wars.
The first wars that Israel fought with its Arab neighbors were conventional struggles in which infantry, artillery, armor and air forces played central roles.
Israel's enemies had few effective tools in the 1950s and 1960s. Abdel Nasser encouraged Palestinian resistance from Gaza in 1955, but it was more harassment than a serious military operation. The Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian conventional armies were what Israel's leaders worried about. Jordan was no match for the Israelis and it had a history of secret agreements with the Zionist leaders, so its military was only a threat when, as in 1967, other Arab leaders convinced the Jordanian leadership to join in a collective effort.
Israel's policies were not merely defensive, contrary to the propaganda one constantly hears from New York. Moshe Sharrett's diaries demonstrate conclusively the expansionist character of the regime. Israel's leaders badly wanted the Sinai Peninsula and therefore a commanding position over the trade of the Red Sea and the Suez Canal in the 1950s and 1960s. There was also some petroleum there. Israel used superiority in armor and air power in 1956 to take the Sinai, in conjunction with an orchestrated Anglo-French attack on Egypt's position in the Suez Canal (which Gamal Abdel Nasser had nationalized that summer). President Dwight D. Eisenhower, afraid that vestiges of Old World colonial thinking would push the Arabs into the arms of the Soviets, made Israel relinquish its prize. But hawks in Israel took the Sinai from Egypt again in the 1967 war, in which Israel again demonstrated that armor plus air superiority always defeats armor that lacks air cover (Israel managed to destroy the Egyptian air force early in the war).
Egypt could not accept loss of its sovereign territory. As the largest Arab state, with a third of the Arab population, and a developing economic, technological and military capability, Egypt could not be dismissed. Its leader from 1970, Anwar El Sadat, found a way of striking back. Egypt launched the 1973 war as a surprise attack, and used sophisticated underwater sand-moving equipment to get across the canal and penetrate into the Sinai. By this time Egypt had Soviet SA-5 surface-to-air missiles that served as anti-aircraft batteries and was careful to keep its tanks under their umbrella. Had Egypt had a better air force, Egyptian armor could have rolled right into Israel proper in October of 1973. The Israeli cabinet is said to have feared it was the fall of the Third Kingdom. But even in the absence of a proper air force, the Soviet SAMs were a game-changer. I would argue that they were the difference between the crushing defeat of Egypt in 1967 and the draw-to-slight victory Cairo won in 1973.
The writing was on the wall. Israel could not have the Sinai. Egypt was too big and too increasingly powerful an enemy to continue to provoke it. 1973 settled that. The Egyptian public was tired of war and its expense, and so both sides were willing to conclude the Camp David Peace Treaty of 1978. Egypt got the Sinai back permanently. Israel escaped the most serious military threat in the region.
Israel's political tradition seeks expansion if possible; if not possible, it seeks a balance of power with its enemies. If that is not possible, it seeks to be held harmless from its avowed foes. If that is not possible, it is willing to wage total war to punish the enemy population until it accepts at least a cold peace. Where necessary, Israel is willing to give up territorial expansion to get the cold peace.
The 1982 Lebanon War was a hybrid. Israel deployed a conventional army against the Palestine Liberation Organization and Lebanon. The PLO fought an unconventional struggle in Beirut, and reached out diplomatically to the US, France and Italy to achieve a negotiated outcome rather than an outright defeat. The PLO had to leave Beirut. But Israel's victory was pyrrhic. 1. The Lebanon War was highly unpopular at home and abroad because it seemed unprovoked. 2. The PLO was not destroyed. 3. Israel's old expansionist tendencies kicked in and it was unwilling to relinquish South Lebanon, such that it began occupying yet another Arab country. 4. Israel's occupation helped create the Shiite resistance we now call Hizbullah, which evolved into a highly effective unconventional military force.
Jordan's government was neutralized in the early 1990s with a peace treaty, just as Egypt's had earlier been with Camp David. The PLO also engaged in the peace process off and on, and with the death of Arafat the old guerrilla PLO seemed to end, as Fatah became a political party.
That development left Israel with three main regional enemies: Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas. Hizbullah in turn gradually attracted Iranian patronage. In the case of the Levantine players, the main issue was Israeli occupation of their land-- south Lebanon and the Shebaa Farms for Hizbullah, the Golan Heights for Syria, and Gaza for Hamas.
The Arab-Israeli wars of the opening years of the 21st century have not been conventional wars. They have been micro-wars. Israel had demonstrated in the earlier Arab-Israeli wars that it could generally win a conventional struggle.
The new repertoires of struggle against Israel had four dimensions.
First, they depended on fundamentalist religious party organization (Hizbullah, Hamas), wherein cadres gained popularity in their own base by providing aid and services (e.g. hospitals, soup kitchens, etc.) This development marked a distinctive move away from the leftist romantic guerrilla model of the late 1960s and the 1970s, which was secular and less organic. Because they are religious and political communities, they can lace their guerrilla organizations and materiel through the civilian sphere. Guerrilla operations might be planned out in a civilian apartment building. Rockets might be stored in a mosque.
Second, they deployed new tactics such as suicide bombing, sophisticated tank-piercing explosively formed projectiles, and the launching of small rockets on Israeli settlements and nearby towns. (Large rockets are vulnerable to the Israeli air force; small rocket launchers are mobile and hard to locate).
Third, the micro-warriors depended on regional-power backing (Syria, Iran) and technical help in the modification of rocket technology and in other areas, such as breaking Israeli codes and gaining the ability to monitor Israeli military communications.
Fourth, they targeted Israel's Achilles heel, its demographic vulnerability. Jewish communities are economically thriving and well integrated in the industrial democracies, and there are significant pull factors encouraging Israeli emigration. Some Israeli demographers think that if one counts the second generation, there are 900,000 Israelis outside of Israel. There are as many as 200,000 Jews now in Germany, mostly from the former Soviet Union, who preferred to go there rather than to Israel. During the Second Intifada or Palestinian uprising, in some years Israel's retention rate of new immigrants fell to unheard-of low levels. Some 50 percent of American immigrants to Israel have returned to the US,and Israel has lost nearly 10% of its one million Russian immigrants. All the violence is nervous-making. The micro-wars, the wars of the rockets, are intended to discourage in-migration to Israel by the Russians and other former East Bloc Jews, and to foster out-migration by Israeli Jews, which the Israeli leadership and Zionism generally view as a dire threat to the character of the Israeli state.
All four dimenstions played a part in Hizbullah's success in forcing Israel to end its occupation of south Lebanon in 2000. That forced withdrawal was micro-war's first big success, and a more decisive victory than Egypt gained with conventional arms in 1973. Israel had to give up its claim on a slice of Arab territory without receiving any guarantees of peace or any advantage whatsoever.
All four dimensions were also at play in the summer, 2006 Israeli-Lebanese War. Hizbullah deployed its rockets so effectively that one fourth of Israelis were forced to flee their homes temporarily. Although the earlier Arab-Israeli wars did sometimes send Israelis to bomb shelters, I don't believe that as much of a fourth of the population was ever made to flee their own dwellings before. Hizbullah benefited from the loyalty to it of villagers and townspeople it had helped with clinics and other social services. Hizbullah was able to penetrate Merkava tanks and even hit an Israeli ship at sea. With Iranian and Syrian help, they had cracked Israeli codes and could listen in on their enemy's military communications. The Israelis had no idea where their caves and tunnels were. Israel lost the war with Hizbullah in the sense that the latter proved resilient. Only by ratcheting the struggle up to a total war, in which Israel hit Lebanese infrastructure in general and killed over 1000 Lebanese, many of them not Hizbullah or even Shiites, was it able to convince the other Lebanese and the UN/Europeans to intervene to restrain Hizbullah. The Israeli attempt to permanently ethnically cleanse the Shiites from Lebanon's deep south near the Israeli border by the use of cluster bombs failed. The ensuing de facto truce allowed Hizbullah to re-arm with rockets and to gain legitimacy as part of the Lebanese cabinet, but the European border patrols under the banner of UNIFIL (UN peacekeepers) have forestalled further micro-warfare against Israel for the moment.
Even as the northern front quietened from fall of 2006, despite Israel having achieved few of its war goals, a new microwar broke out in Gaza.
In the 1980s, when the secular, left-leaning Palestine Liberation Organization predominated as the Palestinian political force, Israeli intelligence funneled some aid to Hamas (descended from the Gaza branch of the Muslim Brotherhood), a fundamentalist group, in hopes of dividing and ruling the Palestinians. That part of the plan worked, but Israeli intelligence created a monster, since as Hamas grew in strength and popularity, it grew increasing vocal about its rejection of Israel and its ambition to see the state dismantled, allowing the emergence of a fundamentalist Muslim Palestinian state where Israel now stands.
The current Israeli military effort to substantially weaken Hamas in Gaza follows on the contradictions in Kadima Party policy. In 2005 Kadima, led by then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon withdrew from the Gaza Strip, which Israel had occupied in 1967. But since Kadima refused to negotiate with Hamas, Israel was unable to shape the political structures of its former colony, leaving the outcome to chance. It was not a stable place By 2005 Gaza had a population of 1.5 million. Although it was a relatively nice little Mediterranean region before the rise of modern nation states, its traditional markets were Egypt and Jordan, and after 1967 its only outlet was Israel, which already produced much the same things as Gaza did. So Gaza had become trapped economically.
Hamas became popular in Gaza in part because of services and in part because of its rejectionism vis-a-vis Israel, and it won the January, 2006, elections for the Palestinian Authority. Because of its rejectionist ideology and its willing to deploy terrorism and micro-war against Israel, Israel and the United States boycotted the PA under Hamas and strove to undo the results of the election.
Here is Aljazeera's timeline for what happened next:
' June 25, 2006: Palestinian fighters conduct an operation in Israel, killing two Israeli soldiers capturing another, Corporal Gilad Shalit.
June 28, 2006: Israel launches Operation Summer Rains in what it says is an attempt to recover the captured soldier. Israel launches air strikes against of bridges, roads, and the only power station in Gaza. Hundreds of Palestinians are killed during aerial and ground attacks over the following months.
June 29, 2006: Israel captures 64 Hamas officials, including eight Palestinian Authority cabinet ministers and up to twenty members of the Palestinian Legislative Council.
September 8:, 2006 UN officials say Gaza is at "breaking point" after months of economic sanctions and Israeli attacks.'
By summer of 2007, the Israelis and the US had managed to sponsor a coup in which the secular Fatah, led by Mahmoud Abbas, took back over the West Bank, and Hamas was confined to Gaza. Hamas pursued the tactic of sending small home-made missiles against nearby Israeli towns, mainly Sderot, emulating what Hizbullah had been doing to the Israeli colony in the occupied Shebaa Farms in 2005-2006. Israel responded primarily by squeezing the Gaza public, denying it enough food, fuel, electricity and services to function healthily, in hopes that it could be made to turn against Hamas. This punishment of the civilian population (half of which consists of children and some large proportion of which does not anyway support Hamas) is illegal in international law, and failed in its purpose. Hamas became ever more entrenched.
Israel's current attack on Gaza is aimed at forestalling an ever more successful microwar waged by Hamas. Its rockets were inaccurate and most seem to have fallen uselessly in the desert. But they did do some property damage and killed 15 Israelis over 8 years, and they also inflicted psychological blows on the fragile Israeli psyche. The Israeli leadership saw a danger that Hamas would become ever better entrenched, organically, in Gaza society and gain all the advantages such a social penetration offers, and that monetary aid from Iran and explosives smuggling through tunnels from the Egyptian Sinai would allow them eventually to wage a truly effective micro-war.
The Israeli leadership knew that it could not reply to Hamas's microwar without engaging in total war on the Gaza population, and that this step would be unpopular with the world's publics. But the Israeli leadership has successfully thumbed its nose and world public opinion so often and so successfully that this sort of consideration does not even enter into their practical calculations (except to the extent that they are careful to do a lot of propaganda for their war effort). Their estimation that they will suffer no practical bad consequences of attacks on civilians is certainly correct in the short to medium term.
The Israel lobbies are wealthy and powerful, and the US congress depends heavily on them for campaign funding. If the US legislators voted on the Gaza operation, they would support Israel except for the same 10 who objected to the war on Lebanon (the 10 are mostly from congressional districts with a lot of Arab-Americans). Israel will suffer no practical sanctions from any government. Egypt and Jordan are afraid of Hamas and are more or less handmaidens of Israeli policy toward Gaza. Syria and Lebanon are weak. Iran, for all the hype it generates, is distant and relatively helpless to intervene. European governments have largely ceded the Palestinian-Israeli issue to the US and Israel.
The main immediate problem for the Israelis is that simply preventing Hamas from waging an ever more sophisticated microwar is an extremely short-term and technical objective. It may or may not be achievable by the methods of the current war, which appear so far to be conventional methods. Its outcome is not very material to a settlement of the larger issues.
The big long-term problem Israel has is that its assiduous colonization of the West Bank has made a two-state solution almost impossible, turning it into an Apartheid state. And if you go on practicing Apartheid long enough, that begins to attact boycotts and sanctions. And forestalling a Palestinian state means that likely the Palestinians will all end up Israeli citizens.
I was on the radio recently with John Bolton, former US ambassador to the UN, and he expressed the hope that Egypt would take back Gaza and Jordan what is left of the West Bank. You may as well dream of pink unicorns on Venus. It isn't going to happen. The Palestinians are Israel's problem. War on them, circumscribe them, colonize them all you like. They aren't going anywhere, and you can't keep them stateless and virtually enslaved forever, occasionally exterminating some of them as though they were vermin when they make too much trouble. That, sooner or later, will lead to boycotts by rising economic powers and by Europe that could be extremely damaging to Israel's long-term prospects as a state.
It may still be 10 or 20 years in the future. But because of Israel's economic and demographic vulnerabilities, for it to lose the war of global public opinion may ultimately be more consequential than either macro-war or micro-war.
The first wars that Israel fought with its Arab neighbors were conventional struggles in which infantry, artillery, armor and air forces played central roles.
Israel's enemies had few effective tools in the 1950s and 1960s. Abdel Nasser encouraged Palestinian resistance from Gaza in 1955, but it was more harassment than a serious military operation. The Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian conventional armies were what Israel's leaders worried about. Jordan was no match for the Israelis and it had a history of secret agreements with the Zionist leaders, so its military was only a threat when, as in 1967, other Arab leaders convinced the Jordanian leadership to join in a collective effort.
Israel's policies were not merely defensive, contrary to the propaganda one constantly hears from New York. Moshe Sharrett's diaries demonstrate conclusively the expansionist character of the regime. Israel's leaders badly wanted the Sinai Peninsula and therefore a commanding position over the trade of the Red Sea and the Suez Canal in the 1950s and 1960s. There was also some petroleum there. Israel used superiority in armor and air power in 1956 to take the Sinai, in conjunction with an orchestrated Anglo-French attack on Egypt's position in the Suez Canal (which Gamal Abdel Nasser had nationalized that summer). President Dwight D. Eisenhower, afraid that vestiges of Old World colonial thinking would push the Arabs into the arms of the Soviets, made Israel relinquish its prize. But hawks in Israel took the Sinai from Egypt again in the 1967 war, in which Israel again demonstrated that armor plus air superiority always defeats armor that lacks air cover (Israel managed to destroy the Egyptian air force early in the war).
Egypt could not accept loss of its sovereign territory. As the largest Arab state, with a third of the Arab population, and a developing economic, technological and military capability, Egypt could not be dismissed. Its leader from 1970, Anwar El Sadat, found a way of striking back. Egypt launched the 1973 war as a surprise attack, and used sophisticated underwater sand-moving equipment to get across the canal and penetrate into the Sinai. By this time Egypt had Soviet SA-5 surface-to-air missiles that served as anti-aircraft batteries and was careful to keep its tanks under their umbrella. Had Egypt had a better air force, Egyptian armor could have rolled right into Israel proper in October of 1973. The Israeli cabinet is said to have feared it was the fall of the Third Kingdom. But even in the absence of a proper air force, the Soviet SAMs were a game-changer. I would argue that they were the difference between the crushing defeat of Egypt in 1967 and the draw-to-slight victory Cairo won in 1973.
The writing was on the wall. Israel could not have the Sinai. Egypt was too big and too increasingly powerful an enemy to continue to provoke it. 1973 settled that. The Egyptian public was tired of war and its expense, and so both sides were willing to conclude the Camp David Peace Treaty of 1978. Egypt got the Sinai back permanently. Israel escaped the most serious military threat in the region.
Israel's political tradition seeks expansion if possible; if not possible, it seeks a balance of power with its enemies. If that is not possible, it seeks to be held harmless from its avowed foes. If that is not possible, it is willing to wage total war to punish the enemy population until it accepts at least a cold peace. Where necessary, Israel is willing to give up territorial expansion to get the cold peace.
The 1982 Lebanon War was a hybrid. Israel deployed a conventional army against the Palestine Liberation Organization and Lebanon. The PLO fought an unconventional struggle in Beirut, and reached out diplomatically to the US, France and Italy to achieve a negotiated outcome rather than an outright defeat. The PLO had to leave Beirut. But Israel's victory was pyrrhic. 1. The Lebanon War was highly unpopular at home and abroad because it seemed unprovoked. 2. The PLO was not destroyed. 3. Israel's old expansionist tendencies kicked in and it was unwilling to relinquish South Lebanon, such that it began occupying yet another Arab country. 4. Israel's occupation helped create the Shiite resistance we now call Hizbullah, which evolved into a highly effective unconventional military force.
Jordan's government was neutralized in the early 1990s with a peace treaty, just as Egypt's had earlier been with Camp David. The PLO also engaged in the peace process off and on, and with the death of Arafat the old guerrilla PLO seemed to end, as Fatah became a political party.
That development left Israel with three main regional enemies: Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas. Hizbullah in turn gradually attracted Iranian patronage. In the case of the Levantine players, the main issue was Israeli occupation of their land-- south Lebanon and the Shebaa Farms for Hizbullah, the Golan Heights for Syria, and Gaza for Hamas.
The Arab-Israeli wars of the opening years of the 21st century have not been conventional wars. They have been micro-wars. Israel had demonstrated in the earlier Arab-Israeli wars that it could generally win a conventional struggle.
The new repertoires of struggle against Israel had four dimensions.
First, they depended on fundamentalist religious party organization (Hizbullah, Hamas), wherein cadres gained popularity in their own base by providing aid and services (e.g. hospitals, soup kitchens, etc.) This development marked a distinctive move away from the leftist romantic guerrilla model of the late 1960s and the 1970s, which was secular and less organic. Because they are religious and political communities, they can lace their guerrilla organizations and materiel through the civilian sphere. Guerrilla operations might be planned out in a civilian apartment building. Rockets might be stored in a mosque.
Second, they deployed new tactics such as suicide bombing, sophisticated tank-piercing explosively formed projectiles, and the launching of small rockets on Israeli settlements and nearby towns. (Large rockets are vulnerable to the Israeli air force; small rocket launchers are mobile and hard to locate).
Third, the micro-warriors depended on regional-power backing (Syria, Iran) and technical help in the modification of rocket technology and in other areas, such as breaking Israeli codes and gaining the ability to monitor Israeli military communications.
Fourth, they targeted Israel's Achilles heel, its demographic vulnerability. Jewish communities are economically thriving and well integrated in the industrial democracies, and there are significant pull factors encouraging Israeli emigration. Some Israeli demographers think that if one counts the second generation, there are 900,000 Israelis outside of Israel. There are as many as 200,000 Jews now in Germany, mostly from the former Soviet Union, who preferred to go there rather than to Israel. During the Second Intifada or Palestinian uprising, in some years Israel's retention rate of new immigrants fell to unheard-of low levels. Some 50 percent of American immigrants to Israel have returned to the US,and Israel has lost nearly 10% of its one million Russian immigrants. All the violence is nervous-making. The micro-wars, the wars of the rockets, are intended to discourage in-migration to Israel by the Russians and other former East Bloc Jews, and to foster out-migration by Israeli Jews, which the Israeli leadership and Zionism generally view as a dire threat to the character of the Israeli state.
All four dimenstions played a part in Hizbullah's success in forcing Israel to end its occupation of south Lebanon in 2000. That forced withdrawal was micro-war's first big success, and a more decisive victory than Egypt gained with conventional arms in 1973. Israel had to give up its claim on a slice of Arab territory without receiving any guarantees of peace or any advantage whatsoever.
All four dimensions were also at play in the summer, 2006 Israeli-Lebanese War. Hizbullah deployed its rockets so effectively that one fourth of Israelis were forced to flee their homes temporarily. Although the earlier Arab-Israeli wars did sometimes send Israelis to bomb shelters, I don't believe that as much of a fourth of the population was ever made to flee their own dwellings before. Hizbullah benefited from the loyalty to it of villagers and townspeople it had helped with clinics and other social services. Hizbullah was able to penetrate Merkava tanks and even hit an Israeli ship at sea. With Iranian and Syrian help, they had cracked Israeli codes and could listen in on their enemy's military communications. The Israelis had no idea where their caves and tunnels were. Israel lost the war with Hizbullah in the sense that the latter proved resilient. Only by ratcheting the struggle up to a total war, in which Israel hit Lebanese infrastructure in general and killed over 1000 Lebanese, many of them not Hizbullah or even Shiites, was it able to convince the other Lebanese and the UN/Europeans to intervene to restrain Hizbullah. The Israeli attempt to permanently ethnically cleanse the Shiites from Lebanon's deep south near the Israeli border by the use of cluster bombs failed. The ensuing de facto truce allowed Hizbullah to re-arm with rockets and to gain legitimacy as part of the Lebanese cabinet, but the European border patrols under the banner of UNIFIL (UN peacekeepers) have forestalled further micro-warfare against Israel for the moment.
Even as the northern front quietened from fall of 2006, despite Israel having achieved few of its war goals, a new microwar broke out in Gaza.
In the 1980s, when the secular, left-leaning Palestine Liberation Organization predominated as the Palestinian political force, Israeli intelligence funneled some aid to Hamas (descended from the Gaza branch of the Muslim Brotherhood), a fundamentalist group, in hopes of dividing and ruling the Palestinians. That part of the plan worked, but Israeli intelligence created a monster, since as Hamas grew in strength and popularity, it grew increasing vocal about its rejection of Israel and its ambition to see the state dismantled, allowing the emergence of a fundamentalist Muslim Palestinian state where Israel now stands.
The current Israeli military effort to substantially weaken Hamas in Gaza follows on the contradictions in Kadima Party policy. In 2005 Kadima, led by then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon withdrew from the Gaza Strip, which Israel had occupied in 1967. But since Kadima refused to negotiate with Hamas, Israel was unable to shape the political structures of its former colony, leaving the outcome to chance. It was not a stable place By 2005 Gaza had a population of 1.5 million. Although it was a relatively nice little Mediterranean region before the rise of modern nation states, its traditional markets were Egypt and Jordan, and after 1967 its only outlet was Israel, which already produced much the same things as Gaza did. So Gaza had become trapped economically.
Hamas became popular in Gaza in part because of services and in part because of its rejectionism vis-a-vis Israel, and it won the January, 2006, elections for the Palestinian Authority. Because of its rejectionist ideology and its willing to deploy terrorism and micro-war against Israel, Israel and the United States boycotted the PA under Hamas and strove to undo the results of the election.
Here is Aljazeera's timeline for what happened next:
' June 25, 2006: Palestinian fighters conduct an operation in Israel, killing two Israeli soldiers capturing another, Corporal Gilad Shalit.
June 28, 2006: Israel launches Operation Summer Rains in what it says is an attempt to recover the captured soldier. Israel launches air strikes against of bridges, roads, and the only power station in Gaza. Hundreds of Palestinians are killed during aerial and ground attacks over the following months.
June 29, 2006: Israel captures 64 Hamas officials, including eight Palestinian Authority cabinet ministers and up to twenty members of the Palestinian Legislative Council.
September 8:, 2006 UN officials say Gaza is at "breaking point" after months of economic sanctions and Israeli attacks.'
By summer of 2007, the Israelis and the US had managed to sponsor a coup in which the secular Fatah, led by Mahmoud Abbas, took back over the West Bank, and Hamas was confined to Gaza. Hamas pursued the tactic of sending small home-made missiles against nearby Israeli towns, mainly Sderot, emulating what Hizbullah had been doing to the Israeli colony in the occupied Shebaa Farms in 2005-2006. Israel responded primarily by squeezing the Gaza public, denying it enough food, fuel, electricity and services to function healthily, in hopes that it could be made to turn against Hamas. This punishment of the civilian population (half of which consists of children and some large proportion of which does not anyway support Hamas) is illegal in international law, and failed in its purpose. Hamas became ever more entrenched.
Israel's current attack on Gaza is aimed at forestalling an ever more successful microwar waged by Hamas. Its rockets were inaccurate and most seem to have fallen uselessly in the desert. But they did do some property damage and killed 15 Israelis over 8 years, and they also inflicted psychological blows on the fragile Israeli psyche. The Israeli leadership saw a danger that Hamas would become ever better entrenched, organically, in Gaza society and gain all the advantages such a social penetration offers, and that monetary aid from Iran and explosives smuggling through tunnels from the Egyptian Sinai would allow them eventually to wage a truly effective micro-war.
The Israeli leadership knew that it could not reply to Hamas's microwar without engaging in total war on the Gaza population, and that this step would be unpopular with the world's publics. But the Israeli leadership has successfully thumbed its nose and world public opinion so often and so successfully that this sort of consideration does not even enter into their practical calculations (except to the extent that they are careful to do a lot of propaganda for their war effort). Their estimation that they will suffer no practical bad consequences of attacks on civilians is certainly correct in the short to medium term.
The Israel lobbies are wealthy and powerful, and the US congress depends heavily on them for campaign funding. If the US legislators voted on the Gaza operation, they would support Israel except for the same 10 who objected to the war on Lebanon (the 10 are mostly from congressional districts with a lot of Arab-Americans). Israel will suffer no practical sanctions from any government. Egypt and Jordan are afraid of Hamas and are more or less handmaidens of Israeli policy toward Gaza. Syria and Lebanon are weak. Iran, for all the hype it generates, is distant and relatively helpless to intervene. European governments have largely ceded the Palestinian-Israeli issue to the US and Israel.
The main immediate problem for the Israelis is that simply preventing Hamas from waging an ever more sophisticated microwar is an extremely short-term and technical objective. It may or may not be achievable by the methods of the current war, which appear so far to be conventional methods. Its outcome is not very material to a settlement of the larger issues.
The big long-term problem Israel has is that its assiduous colonization of the West Bank has made a two-state solution almost impossible, turning it into an Apartheid state. And if you go on practicing Apartheid long enough, that begins to attact boycotts and sanctions. And forestalling a Palestinian state means that likely the Palestinians will all end up Israeli citizens.
I was on the radio recently with John Bolton, former US ambassador to the UN, and he expressed the hope that Egypt would take back Gaza and Jordan what is left of the West Bank. You may as well dream of pink unicorns on Venus. It isn't going to happen. The Palestinians are Israel's problem. War on them, circumscribe them, colonize them all you like. They aren't going anywhere, and you can't keep them stateless and virtually enslaved forever, occasionally exterminating some of them as though they were vermin when they make too much trouble. That, sooner or later, will lead to boycotts by rising economic powers and by Europe that could be extremely damaging to Israel's long-term prospects as a state.
It may still be 10 or 20 years in the future. But because of Israel's economic and demographic vulnerabilities, for it to lose the war of global public opinion may ultimately be more consequential than either macro-war or micro-war.
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Paris Hilton and Iraqi Prisoners
Juan Cole has an insightful comparison between the media attention on Paris Hilton and Iraqi Prisoners.
American cable news has been fixated on the jailing of socialite Paris Hilton for the past week, on grounds that she twice violated the probation sentence she earlier received for drunk driving. They interrupted coverage of world leaders at the G8. They briefly spliced in Gates's decision not to reappoint Peter Pace as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. A new frenzy broke out with every tiny twist . She was brave, she was weeping, she was mentally fragile. She was released, she was rejailed, she shouted it was unfair and cried, she was undergoing psychiatric evaluation.
Just for a little perspective, we could consider the news from Iraq on Saturday. Incoming mortar fire from guerrillas hit Bucca prison, killing 6 inmates and wounding 50.
The US military is holding 19000 Iraqis, 16000 of them at Bucca. Although most are guerrillas or their helpers, a lot of them were picked up because they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Once arrested, an inmate often cannot clear himself for months or years. I don't think they have access to attorneys. No one cares if they are depressed. At Abu Ghraib earlier on, some inmates were systematically tortured. It is unlear if all such practices have ceased.
Some Iraqi women have been held in this way. Some were essentially hostages, taken to make them reveal where their husbands or fathers were or to guarantee their good behavior. Their reputations were shot, since Iraqis think Americans are sex fiends and wouldn't trust the virtue of a woman who had been in their custody. The unmarried among them are likely doomed to be spinsters.
American television never mentions that the US has 19000 Iraqis in jail, or that some have been women, or that some are innocent, or how they feel about being in prison.
So is Paris Hilton being given special treatment by our media? We all are, folks.
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