I have found it really hard to find time and energy to blog recently. Lots has been going on with Just World Books. This very evening, we are launching Manan Ahmed's terrific book Where the Wild Frontiers Are: Pakistan and the American Imagination. I'm in New York to do this. It's being hosted by the Asian-American Writers' Workshop-- starts 90 minutes from now!

Timely, huh? Also timely: our next book, Troubled Triangle: The United States, Turkey, and Israel in the New Middle East, edited by the fabulous William B. Quandt.

Wednesday, I'm leaving for the Algiers, where Bill the spouse and I are both taking part in a "Colloque" on the Arab Spring being organized in conjunction with the Algiers Book Fair. I am also hoping to meet some Arabic-language and French-language publishers who might be interested in buying other-language rights to some of our books.

I know there has been a lot happening recently (especially, here in New York) around Abu Mazen's last-ditch effort to save his legacy by taking the "Palestinian statehood" request to the Security Council. There's been a lot of dissension in Palestinian ranks about the value of this effort. And yes, it does seem very possible that the statehood request might just languish for months or years in some subcommittee of the Security Council... The matter would be a lot more straightforward if Abu Mazen and his people were to insist on taking a request for enhanced recognition to the General Assembly, and forcing a vote there...

Whatever happens to this particular initiative at this particular time, it already seems that pressure is mounting in the non-U.S. 95% of the global community that the United States has monopolized all Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy for too long now; and that the U.S. has proven itself uniquely unqualified and/or unable to do anything to bring about a fair and sustainable peace... and therefore, that some other, more authoritative and capable form of international sponsorship is needed in order to deal successfully with this important item on the world's agenda.

I haven't been able to blog much about this recently. Last week I had a flare-up of horrible back pain, which laid me somewhat low. But next week, on October 4, I'm speaking on the Palestinian statehood issue at Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. (I think that's an open meeting: Check their website over the next few days, for details. They don't have any up there yet.)

Tags: Just World News

... I want to link, first, to these reflections on 9/11, that I published in Friends Journal in 2007, and to this column, that I wrote for the Christian Science Monitor on 9/11 itself, and which ran in the paper two days later.

Tomorrow, on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I'll be spending a lot of time with my fellow Quakers here in Charlottesville. It feels like the right thing to do. At the Quaker meeting for worship (worship service) that we held very soon after the original 9/11, I said that then was the time that "the rubber really hit the road" for the adherence nearly all Quakers profess to the testimony of nonviolence and to the avoidance not just of all wars but also of the causes of war.

I believe that today, more Americans understand the futility and damaging nature of wars-- all wars-- than did ten years ago. But still, far too many of our countrymen and -women remain susceptible to arguments like those made in favor of the military "action" or military "intervention" in Libya earlier this year. (The advocates of such "interventions" are nowadays careful not to come straight out and call them "wars".)

I mourn for each of the lives cut short on 9/11. But I mourn equally for each one of the lives cut short as a result of all the American and American-led wars since then. I bear a heavy weight of concern for the men still incarcerated under inhuman conditions and with no access to due process and no hope of any timely and fair trial-- in Guantanamo and other elements of the U.S. 'black' prison system worldwide. I mourn for the moral blindness and real spiritual wounds suffered by all those who act with, or condone, violence. And I am staggered to think of the "opportunity costs" the whole world has incurred as a result of all the United States' military spending since, and largely as a result of, what happened on 9/11: All the wonderful, life-supporting projects that that money could and should have been used for instead, which would have made the world a far safer place for everyone-- including Americans.

Since 9/11, my own three children have grown into mature, capable, and wonderful adults. Two of them have married and now have children of their own. We all have a new generation to raise. The need to build a better world for these little ones-- for all the little ones around the world!-- has never felt more urgent. Our generation has a lot to apologize for. But luckily, many of us are still around, with a good few years of energetic and loving activism left in us, to try to make some good amends and get the global situation turned back onto a better track...

Here's what I'm going to be doing next weekend: Friday night, speaking at the Annual Conference of the U.S. Campaign to End the Occupation in Washington DC; and Sunday noon, speaking at the second conference this year that marks the 50th anniversary of Eisenhower's 1961 warning about the dangers of the emergence of a "Military Industrial Complex." This one's in Charlottesville.

These both feel like great ways to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the tragedies of 9/11. Come to one or both, if you can.

Tags: Just World News

... I want to link, first, to these reflections on 9/11, that I published in Friends Journal in 2007, and to this column, that I wrote for the Christian Science Monitor on 9/11 itself, and which ran in the paper two days later.

Tomorrow, on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I'll be spending a lot of time with my fellow Quakers here in Charlottesville. It feels like the right thing to do. At the Quaker meeting for worship (worship service) that we held very soon after the original 9/11, I said that then was the time that "the rubber really hit the road" for the adherence nearly all Quakers profess to the testimony of nonviolence and to the avoidance not just of all wars but also of the causes of war.

I believe that today, more Americans understand the futility and damaging nature of wars-- all wars-- than did ten years ago. But still, far too many of our countrymen and -women remain susceptible to arguments like those made in favor of the military "action" or military "intervention" in Libya earlier this year. (The advocates of such "interventions" are nowadays careful not to come straight out and call them "wars".)

I mourn for each of the lives cut short on 9/11. But I mourn equally for each one of the lives cut short as a result of all the American and American-led wars since then. I bear a heavy weight of concern for the men still incarcerated under inhuman conditions and with no access to due process and no hope of any timely and fair trial-- in Guantanamo and other elements of the U.S. 'black' prison system worldwide. I mourn for the moral blindness and real spiritual wounds suffered by all those who act with, or condone, violence. And I am staggered to think of the "opportunity costs" the whole world has incurred as a result of all the United States' military spending since, and largely as a result of, what happened on 9/11: All the wonderful, life-supporting projects that that money could and should have been used for instead, which would have made the world a far safer place for everyone-- including Americans.

Since 9/11, my own three children have grown into mature, capable, and wonderful adults. Two of them have married and now have children of their own. We all have a new generation to raise. The need to build a better world for these little ones-- for all the little ones around the world!-- has never felt more urgent. Our generation has a lot to apologize for. But luckily, many of us are still around, with a good few years of energetic and loving activism left in us, to try to make some good amends and get the global situation turned back onto a better track...

Here's what I'm going to be doing next weekend: Friday night, speaking at the Annual Conference of the U.S. Campaign to End the Occupation in Washington DC; and Sunday noon, speaking at the second conference this year that marks the 50th anniversary of Eisenhower's 1961 warning about the dangers of the emergence of a "Military Industrial Complex." This one's in Charlottesville.

These both feel like great ways to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the tragedies of 9/11. Come to one or both, if you can.

Tags: Just World News

... I want to link, first, to these reflections on 9/11, that I published in Friends Journal in 2007, and to this column, that I wrote for the Christian Science Monitor on 9/11 itself, and which ran in the paper two days later.

Tomorrow, on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I'll be spending a lot of time with my fellow Quakers here in Charlottesville. It feels like the right thing to do. At the Quaker meeting for worship (worship service) that we held very soon after the original 9/11, I said that then was the time that "the rubber really hit the road" for the adherence nearly all Quakers profess to the testimony of nonviolence and to the avoidance not just of all wars but also of the causes of war.

I believe that today, more Americans understand the futility and damaging nature of wars-- all wars-- than did ten years ago. But still, far too many of our countrymen and -women remain susceptible to arguments like those made in favor of the military "action" or military "intervention" in Libya earlier this year. (The advocates of such "interventions" are nowadays careful not to come straight out and call them "wars".)

I mourn for each of the lives cut short on 9/11. But I mourn equally for each one of the lives cut short as a result of all the American and American-led wars since then. I bear a heavy weight of concern for the men still incarcerated under inhuman conditions and with no access to due process and no hope of any timely and fair trial-- in Guantanamo and other elements of the U.S. 'black' prison system worldwide. I mourn for the moral blindness and real spiritual wounds suffered by all those who act with, or condone, violence. And I am staggered to think of the "opportunity costs" the whole world has incurred as a result of all the United States' military spending since, and largely as a result of, what happened on 9/11: All the wonderful, life-supporting projects that that money could and should have been used for instead, which would have made the world a far safer place for everyone-- including Americans.

Since 9/11, my own three children have grown into mature, capable, and wonderful adults. Two of them have married and now have children of their own. We all have a new generation to raise. The need to build a better world for these little ones-- for all the little ones around the world!-- has never felt more urgent. Our generation has a lot to apologize for. But luckily, many of us are still around, with a good few years of energetic and loving activism left in us, to try to make some good amends and get the global situation turned back onto a better track...

Here's what I'm going to be doing next weekend: Friday night, speaking at the Annual Conference of the U.S. Campaign to End the Occupation in Washington DC; and Sunday noon, speaking at the second conference this year that marks the 50th anniversary of Eisenhower's 1961 warning about the dangers of the emergence of a "Military Industrial Complex." This one's in Charlottesville.

These both feel like great ways to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the tragedies of 9/11. Come to one or both, if you can.

Tags: Just World News

... I want to link, first, to these reflections on 9/11, that I published in Friends Journal in 2007, and to this column, that I wrote for the Christian Science Monitor on 9/11 itself, and which ran in the paper two days later.

Tomorrow, on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I'll be spending a lot of time with my fellow Quakers here in Charlottesville. It feels like the right thing to do. At the Quaker meeting for worship (worship service) that we held very soon after the original 9/11, I said that then was the time that "the rubber really hit the road" for the adherence nearly all Quakers profess to the testimony of nonviolence and to the avoidance not just of all wars but also of the causes of war.

I believe that today, more Americans understand the futility and damaging nature of wars-- all wars-- than did ten years ago. But still, far too many of our countrymen and -women remain susceptible to arguments like those made in favor of the military "action" or military "intervention" in Libya earlier this year. (The advocates of such "interventions" are nowadays careful not to come straight out and call them "wars".)

I mourn for each of the lives cut short on 9/11. But I mourn equally for each one of the lives cut short as a result of all the American and American-led wars since then. I bear a heavy weight of concern for the men still incarcerated under inhuman conditions and with no access to due process and no hope of any timely and fair trial-- in Guantanamo and other elements of the U.S. 'black' prison system worldwide. I mourn for the moral blindness and real spiritual wounds suffered by all those who act with, or condone, violence. And I am staggered to think of the "opportunity costs" the whole world has incurred as a result of all the United States' military spending since, and largely as a result of, what happened on 9/11: All the wonderful, life-supporting projects that that money could and should have been used for instead, which would have made the world a far safer place for everyone-- including Americans.

Since 9/11, my own three children have grown into mature, capable, and wonderful adults. Two of them have married and now have children of their own. We all have a new generation to raise. The need to build a better world for these little ones-- for all the little ones around the world!-- has never felt more urgent. Our generation has a lot to apologize for. But luckily, many of us are still around, with a good few years of energetic and loving activism left in us, to try to make some good amends and get the global situation turned back onto a better track...

Here's what I'm going to be doing next weekend: Friday night, speaking at the Annual Conference of the U.S. Campaign to End the Occupation in Washington DC; and Sunday noon, speaking at the second conference this year that marks the 50th anniversary of Eisenhower's 1961 warning about the dangers of the emergence of a "Military Industrial Complex." This one's in Charlottesville.

These both feel like great ways to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the tragedies of 9/11. Come to one or both, if you can.

Tags: Just World News

... I want to link, first, to these reflections on 9/11, that I published in Friends Journal in 2007, and to this column, that I wrote for the Christian Science Monitor on 9/11 itself, and which ran in the paper two days later.

Tomorrow, on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I'll be spending a lot of time with my fellow Quakers here in Charlottesville. It feels like the right thing to do. At the Quaker meeting for worship (worship service) that we held very soon after the original 9/11, I said that then was the time that "the rubber really hit the road" for the adherence nearly all Quakers profess to the testimony of nonviolence and to the avoidance not just of all wars but also of the causes of war.

I believe that today, more Americans understand the futility and damaging nature of wars-- all wars-- than did ten years ago. But still, far too many of our countrymen and -women remain susceptible to arguments like those made in favor of the military "action" or military "intervention" in Libya earlier this year. (The advocates of such "interventions" are nowadays careful not to come straight out and call them "wars".)

I mourn for each of the lives cut short on 9/11. But I mourn equally for each one of the lives cut short as a result of all the American and American-led wars since then. I bear a heavy weight of concern for the men still incarcerated under inhuman conditions and with no access to due process and no hope of any timely and fair trial-- in Guantanamo and other elements of the U.S. 'black' prison system worldwide. I mourn for the moral blindness and real spiritual wounds suffered by all those who act with, or condone, violence. And I am staggered to think of the "opportunity costs" the whole world has incurred as a result of all the United States' military spending since, and largely as a result of, what happened on 9/11: All the wonderful, life-supporting projects that that money could and should have been used for instead, which would have made the world a far safer place for everyone-- including Americans.

Since 9/11, my own three children have grown into mature, capable, and wonderful adults. Two of them have married and now have children of their own. We all have a new generation to raise. The need to build a better world for these little ones-- for all the little ones around the world!-- has never felt more urgent. Our generation has a lot to apologize for. But luckily, many of us are still around, with a good few years of energetic and loving activism left in us, to try to make some good amends and get the global situation turned back onto a better track...

Here's what I'm going to be doing next weekend: Friday night, speaking at the Annual Conference of the U.S. Campaign to End the Occupation in Washington DC; and Sunday noon, speaking at the second conference this year that marks the 50th anniversary of Eisenhower's 1961 warning about the dangers of the emergence of a "Military Industrial Complex." This one's in Charlottesville.

These both feel like great ways to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the tragedies of 9/11. Come to one or both, if you can.

Tags: Just World News

The U.S. discourse space is filling up rapidly with "ten years after" pieces related to 9/11. Me, these days I mainly just feel tired, tired. People in the U.S. political elite never listened to those of us who, prior to September 2011, had spent a whole career studying and interacting with the problems of the Middle East and the world, and who warned as loud as we could about the dangers of over-reacting and of taking that oh-so-tempting path toward militarism and U.S. unilateralism.

Actually, it was far worse than that. It's not just that they did not listen to us. They derided us and our expertise and many well-connected members of the elite went to great lengths to exclude our voices from the national discourse. Many of us suffered great professional harm from those campaigns.

So how do I feel today when I see this piece from WaPo uber-columnist Richard Cohen? In it, Cohen finally comes straight out and calls the situation in Iraq in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion there "a disaster" and notes,

It was not Saddam Hussein who attacked us, and it was not Saddam Hussein who had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons or a nuclear program. None of these existed — not a mere intelligence mistake, as is now claimed, but a mistake caused by preconceived notions, an insistence on seeing a goblin in every shadow, a nuclear program in the weak glow of a watch face, a lust for the head of Saddam Hussein. Oops, we marched smartly off to the wrong war.

At the end of the column Cohen comes as close to a "mea culpa" as I have seen him get:

I went home on Sept. 11 with my shoes dusted with the detritus of the World Trade Center. I felt a hate that was entirely new to me. Soon after, the anthrax attacks began, and I was ready for war — against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, for sure, but against Saddam Hussein as well. I was wrong, and for that I blame myself, but I blame us all for going along with it and then rewarding incompetence with another term...

Excuse me, Richard Cohen? " I blame us all for going along with it..." ??

There were a good few of us who did not "go along with" the whole project to invade Iraq, who questioned the flim-flammy evidence being adduced to justify that invasion from the very beginning. Go back and read the CSM columns I was writing in the months before March 2003. Go and read what I was blogging in February 2003... The record is there.

And now, Richard Cohen, you have the gall to say, "I blame us all"??

What a self-referential, sad, and immature person you are, Richard Cohen, for (a) completely ignoring the contribution made by all those of us who warned against the invasion of Iraq from the get-go, and then (b) trying to dilute the level of the "blame" you allot to yourself by trying to make the claim that, "everyone else did it too."

Everyone else did not do it.

So now, firstly, you owe us an apology. Secondly, you need to tell us what you will do to rebuild the basis of the national discourse so that that wilfull, ideologically manipulated "manufacturing of consent" that happened in the lead-up to March 2003 never happens again.

This is not all about you, Richard Cohen. It is about steering this country back to a foreign policy that is based on a solid respect for both facts and the principles of international law. And no, we are not there yet, by any means....

Tags: Just World News

The U.S. discourse space is filling up rapidly with "ten years after" pieces related to 9/11. Me, these days I mainly just feel tired, tired. People in the U.S. political elite never listened to those of us who, prior to September 2011, had spent a whole career studying and interacting with the problems of the Middle East and the world, and who warned as loud as we could about the dangers of over-reacting and of taking that oh-so-tempting path toward militarism and U.S. unilateralism.

Actually, it was far worse than that. It's not just that they did not listen to us. They derided us and our expertise and many well-connected members of the elite went to great lengths to exclude our voices from the national discourse. Many of us suffered great professional harm from those campaigns.

So how do I feel today when I see this piece from WaPo uber-columnist Richard Cohen? In it, Cohen finally comes straight out and calls the situation in Iraq in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion there "a disaster" and notes,

It was not Saddam Hussein who attacked us, and it was not Saddam Hussein who had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons or a nuclear program. None of these existed — not a mere intelligence mistake, as is now claimed, but a mistake caused by preconceived notions, an insistence on seeing a goblin in every shadow, a nuclear program in the weak glow of a watch face, a lust for the head of Saddam Hussein. Oops, we marched smartly off to the wrong war.

At the end of the column Cohen comes as close to a "mea culpa" as I have seen him get:

I went home on Sept. 11 with my shoes dusted with the detritus of the World Trade Center. I felt a hate that was entirely new to me. Soon after, the anthrax attacks began, and I was ready for war — against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, for sure, but against Saddam Hussein as well. I was wrong, and for that I blame myself, but I blame us all for going along with it and then rewarding incompetence with another term...

Excuse me, Richard Cohen? " I blame us all for going along with it..." ??

There were a good few of us who did not "go along with" the whole project to invade Iraq, who questioned the flim-flammy evidence being adduced to justify that invasion from the very beginning. Go back and read the CSM columns I was writing in the months before March 2003. Go and read what I was blogging in February 2003... The record is there.

And now, Richard Cohen, you have the gall to say, "I blame us all"??

What a self-referential, sad, and immature person you are, Richard Cohen, for (a) completely ignoring the contribution made by all those of us who warned against the invasion of Iraq from the get-go, and then (b) trying to dilute the level of the "blame" you allot to yourself by trying to make the claim that, "everyone else did it too."

Everyone else did not do it.

So now, firstly, you owe us an apology. Secondly, you need to tell us what you will do to rebuild the basis of the national discourse so that that wilfull, ideologically manipulated "manufacturing of consent" that happened in the lead-up to March 2003 never happens again.

This is not all about you, Richard Cohen. It is about steering this country back to a foreign policy that is based on a solid respect for both facts and the principles of international law. And no, we are not there yet, by any means....

Tags: Just World News

The U.S. discourse space is filling up rapidly with "ten years after" pieces related to 9/11. Me, these days I mainly just feel tired, tired. People in the U.S. political elite never listened to those of us who, prior to September 2011, had spent a whole career studying and interacting with the problems of the Middle East and the world, and who warned as loud as we could about the dangers of over-reacting and of taking that oh-so-tempting path toward militarism and U.S. unilateralism.

Actually, it was far worse than that. It's not just that they did not listen to us. They derided us and our expertise and many well-connected members of the elite went to great lengths to exclude our voices from the national discourse. Many of us suffered great professional harm from those campaigns.

So how do I feel today when I see this piece from WaPo uber-columnist Richard Cohen? In it, Cohen finally comes straight out and calls the situation in Iraq in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion there "a disaster" and notes,

It was not Saddam Hussein who attacked us, and it was not Saddam Hussein who had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons or a nuclear program. None of these existed — not a mere intelligence mistake, as is now claimed, but a mistake caused by preconceived notions, an insistence on seeing a goblin in every shadow, a nuclear program in the weak glow of a watch face, a lust for the head of Saddam Hussein. Oops, we marched smartly off to the wrong war.

At the end of the column Cohen comes as close to a "mea culpa" as I have seen him get:

I went home on Sept. 11 with my shoes dusted with the detritus of the World Trade Center. I felt a hate that was entirely new to me. Soon after, the anthrax attacks began, and I was ready for war — against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, for sure, but against Saddam Hussein as well. I was wrong, and for that I blame myself, but I blame us all for going along with it and then rewarding incompetence with another term...

Excuse me, Richard Cohen? " I blame us all for going along with it..." ??

There were a good few of us who did not "go along with" the whole project to invade Iraq, who questioned the flim-flammy evidence being adduced to justify that invasion from the very beginning. Go back and read the CSM columns I was writing in the months before March 2003. Go and read what I was blogging in February 2003... The record is there.

And now, Richard Cohen, you have the gall to say, "I blame us all"??

What a self-referential, sad, and immature person you are, Richard Cohen, for (a) completely ignoring the contribution made by all those of us who warned against the invasion of Iraq from the get-go, and then (b) trying to dilute the level of the "blame" you allot to yourself by trying to make the claim that, "everyone else did it too."

Everyone else did not do it.

So now, firstly, you owe us an apology. Secondly, you need to tell us what you will do to rebuild the basis of the national discourse so that that wilfull, ideologically manipulated "manufacturing of consent" that happened in the lead-up to March 2003 never happens again.

This is not all about you, Richard Cohen. It is about steering this country back to a foreign policy that is based on a solid respect for both facts and the principles of international law. And no, we are not there yet, by any means....

Tags: Just World News

The NATO-assisted uprising in Libya is now in the last phases of taking the whole country. These phases may well be marked by some major rights abuses-- conducted in the name of "mopping up" operations and motivated by some combination of vengeance and triumphalism.

I hope that such excesses are kept to a minimum and that reporters on the ground are careful both to pay attention and to report accurately what they see.

Meanwhile, I see that Ben Rhodes, a former speechwriter who somehow got elevated to "deputy national security adviser for communications" has been doing a bit of a victory lap with Foreign Policy's Josh Rogin.

This part of Rogin's report struck me as particularly worrying:

President Barack Obama's strategy for the military intervention in Libya will not only result in a better outcome in Libya but also will form the basis of Obama's preferred model for any future military interventions, Rhodes said.

"There are two principles that the president stressed at the outset [of the Libya intervention] that have borne out in our approach. The first is that we believe that it's far more legitimate and effective for regime change to be pursued by an indigenous political movement than by the United States or foreign powers," said Rhodes. "Secondly, we put an emphasis on burden sharing, so that the U.S. wasn't bearing the brunt of the burden and so that you had not just international support for the effort, but also meaningful international contributions."

Why would we imagine that the U.S. president should even be in need of any form of a "model" for "future military interventions"?

But more to the point, the real "victory" for Libya's people, if there is to be one, is still very far indeed from having been won.

Do we have any assurance at all at this point that the situation in Libya, in 2020, will be any better than the still-tragic situation in Iraq today, eight years after the U.S. "victory" on the battlefield there in 2003... Or, than the still-horrendous situation in Afghanistan today, nearly ten years after the U.S. "victory" on that battlefield, in 2001?

Libya, after 36 years of brutal Italian colonial rule, 40 years of Qadhafi's rule, and the most recent five months of armed conflict, has very few institutions of good governance and almost no culture or tradition of good governance. We have also seen very disturbing social fissures opening up during these most recent months of war-- between easterners and westerners, and between Arabs and Imazaghen. I am trying hard to muster some hope that the country's "transition" to a decent level and quality of self-governance can be well achieved within the next 2-3 years, but it is really hard to see any indications of how this might be achieved.

What is true is that, given its geography, Libya is a real and present challenge primarily for Italy and the other countries of Europe-- and also for its two in-transition Arab neighbors Egypt and Tunisia. But Egypt and Tunisia are both extremely (and rightly) busy with their own concerns; and Egypt is anyway somewhat buffered from events in Libya by large expanses of desert.

As for Italy and the other European countries-- well, they all also have huge concerns of their own right now, and probably not a lot of attention or resources to devote to providing useful help to the Libyans.

It is thus almost impossible to identify any non-Libyan power who can provide solid, disinterested, useful help to Libya's people as they face the present challenges of post-war social reconstruction. Possibly Turkey? Who knows?

What is clear now, though, is that this task will be huge, and it has barely even begun...

Tags: Just World News

The NATO-assisted uprising in Libya is now in the last phases of taking the whole country. These phases may well be marked by some major rights abuses-- conducted in the name of "mopping up" operations and motivated by some combination of vengeance and triumphalism.

I hope that such excesses are kept to a minimum and that reporters on the ground are careful both to pay attention and to report accurately what they see.

Meanwhile, I see that Ben Rhodes, a former speechwriter who somehow got elevated to "deputy national security adviser for communications" has been doing a bit of a victory lap with Foreign Policy's Josh Rogin.

This part of Rogin's report struck me as particularly worrying:

President Barack Obama's strategy for the military intervention in Libya will not only result in a better outcome in Libya but also will form the basis of Obama's preferred model for any future military interventions, Rhodes said.

"There are two principles that the president stressed at the outset [of the Libya intervention] that have borne out in our approach. The first is that we believe that it's far more legitimate and effective for regime change to be pursued by an indigenous political movement than by the United States or foreign powers," said Rhodes. "Secondly, we put an emphasis on burden sharing, so that the U.S. wasn't bearing the brunt of the burden and so that you had not just international support for the effort, but also meaningful international contributions."

Why would we imagine that the U.S. president should even be in need of any form of a "model" for "future military interventions"?

But more to the point, the real "victory" for Libya's people, if there is to be one, is still very far indeed from having been won.

Do we have any assurance at all at this point that the situation in Libya, in 2020, will be any better than the still-tragic situation in Iraq today, eight years after the U.S. "victory" on the battlefield there in 2003... Or, than the still-horrendous situation in Afghanistan today, nearly ten years after the U.S. "victory" on that battlefield, in 2001?

Libya, after 36 years of brutal Italian colonial rule, 40 years of Qadhafi's rule, and the most recent five months of armed conflict, has very few institutions of good governance and almost no culture or tradition of good governance. We have also seen very disturbing social fissures opening up during these most recent months of war-- between easterners and westerners, and between Arabs and Imazaghen. I am trying hard to muster some hope that the country's "transition" to a decent level and quality of self-governance can be well achieved within the next 2-3 years, but it is really hard to see any indications of how this might be achieved.

What is true is that, given its geography, Libya is a real and present challenge primarily for Italy and the other countries of Europe-- and also for its two in-transition Arab neighbors Egypt and Tunisia. But Egypt and Tunisia are both extremely (and rightly) busy with their own concerns; and Egypt is anyway somewhat buffered from events in Libya by large expanses of desert.

As for Italy and the other European countries-- well, they all also have huge concerns of their own right now, and probably not a lot of attention or resources to devote to providing useful help to the Libyans.

It is thus almost impossible to identify any non-Libyan power who can provide solid, disinterested, useful help to Libya's people as they face the present challenges of post-war social reconstruction. Possibly Turkey? Who knows?

What is clear now, though, is that this task will be huge, and it has barely even begun...

Tags: Just World News

The NATO-assisted uprising in Libya is now in the last phases of taking the whole country. These phases may well be marked by some major rights abuses-- conducted in the name of "mopping up" operations and motivated by some combination of vengeance and triumphalism.

I hope that such excesses are kept to a minimum and that reporters on the ground are careful both to pay attention and to report accurately what they see.

Meanwhile, I see that Ben Rhodes, a former speechwriter who somehow got elevated to "deputy national security adviser for communications" has been doing a bit of a victory lap with Foreign Policy's Josh Rogin.

This part of Rogin's report struck me as particularly worrying:

President Barack Obama's strategy for the military intervention in Libya will not only result in a better outcome in Libya but also will form the basis of Obama's preferred model for any future military interventions, Rhodes said.

"There are two principles that the president stressed at the outset [of the Libya intervention] that have borne out in our approach. The first is that we believe that it's far more legitimate and effective for regime change to be pursued by an indigenous political movement than by the United States or foreign powers," said Rhodes. "Secondly, we put an emphasis on burden sharing, so that the U.S. wasn't bearing the brunt of the burden and so that you had not just international support for the effort, but also meaningful international contributions."

Why would we imagine that the U.S. president should even be in need of any form of a "model" for "future military interventions"?

But more to the point, the real "victory" for Libya's people, if there is to be one, is still very far indeed from having been won.

Do we have any assurance at all at this point that the situation in Libya, in 2020, will be any better than the still-tragic situation in Iraq today, eight years after the U.S. "victory" on the battlefield there in 2003... Or, than the still-horrendous situation in Afghanistan today, nearly ten years after the U.S. "victory" on that battlefield, in 2001?

Libya, after 36 years of brutal Italian colonial rule, 40 years of Qadhafi's rule, and the most recent five months of armed conflict, has very few institutions of good governance and almost no culture or tradition of good governance. We have also seen very disturbing social fissures opening up during these most recent months of war-- between easterners and westerners, and between Arabs and Imazaghen. I am trying hard to muster some hope that the country's "transition" to a decent level and quality of self-governance can be well achieved within the next 2-3 years, but it is really hard to see any indications of how this might be achieved.

What is true is that, given its geography, Libya is a real and present challenge primarily for Italy and the other countries of Europe-- and also for its two in-transition Arab neighbors Egypt and Tunisia. But Egypt and Tunisia are both extremely (and rightly) busy with their own concerns; and Egypt is anyway somewhat buffered from events in Libya by large expanses of desert.

As for Italy and the other European countries-- well, they all also have huge concerns of their own right now, and probably not a lot of attention or resources to devote to providing useful help to the Libyans.

It is thus almost impossible to identify any non-Libyan power who can provide solid, disinterested, useful help to Libya's people as they face the present challenges of post-war social reconstruction. Possibly Turkey? Who knows?

What is clear now, though, is that this task will be huge, and it has barely even begun...

Tags: Just World News

The NATO-assisted uprising in Libya is now in the last phases of taking the whole country. These phases may well be marked by some major rights abuses-- conducted in the name of "mopping up" operations and motivated by some combination of vengeance and triumphalism.

I hope that such excesses are kept to a minimum and that reporters on the ground are careful both to pay attention and to report accurately what they see.

Meanwhile, I see that Ben Rhodes, a former speechwriter who somehow got elevated to "deputy national security adviser for communications" has been doing a bit of a victory lap with Foreign Policy's Josh Rogin.

This part of Rogin's report struck me as particularly worrying:

President Barack Obama's strategy for the military intervention in Libya will not only result in a better outcome in Libya but also will form the basis of Obama's preferred model for any future military interventions, Rhodes said.

"There are two principles that the president stressed at the outset [of the Libya intervention] that have borne out in our approach. The first is that we believe that it's far more legitimate and effective for regime change to be pursued by an indigenous political movement than by the United States or foreign powers," said Rhodes. "Secondly, we put an emphasis on burden sharing, so that the U.S. wasn't bearing the brunt of the burden and so that you had not just international support for the effort, but also meaningful international contributions."

Why would we imagine that the U.S. president should even be in need of any form of a "model" for "future military interventions"?

But more to the point, the real "victory" for Libya's people, if there is to be one, is still very far indeed from having been won.

Do we have any assurance at all at this point that the situation in Libya, in 2020, will be any better than the still-tragic situation in Iraq today, eight years after the U.S. "victory" on the battlefield there in 2003... Or, than the still-horrendous situation in Afghanistan today, nearly ten years after the U.S. "victory" on that battlefield, in 2001?

Libya, after 36 years of brutal Italian colonial rule, 40 years of Qadhafi's rule, and the most recent five months of armed conflict, has very few institutions of good governance and almost no culture or tradition of good governance. We have also seen very disturbing social fissures opening up during these most recent months of war-- between easterners and westerners, and between Arabs and Imazaghen. I am trying hard to muster some hope that the country's "transition" to a decent level and quality of self-governance can be well achieved within the next 2-3 years, but it is really hard to see any indications of how this might be achieved.

What is true is that, given its geography, Libya is a real and present challenge primarily for Italy and the other countries of Europe-- and also for its two in-transition Arab neighbors Egypt and Tunisia. But Egypt and Tunisia are both extremely (and rightly) busy with their own concerns; and Egypt is anyway somewhat buffered from events in Libya by large expanses of desert.

As for Italy and the other European countries-- well, they all also have huge concerns of their own right now, and probably not a lot of attention or resources to devote to providing useful help to the Libyans.

It is thus almost impossible to identify any non-Libyan power who can provide solid, disinterested, useful help to Libya's people as they face the present challenges of post-war social reconstruction. Possibly Turkey? Who knows?

What is clear now, though, is that this task will be huge, and it has barely even begun...

Tags: Just World News

... with the whole family. It proved ways harder to pay attention to the news than I'd expected. Something to do with having three grandchildren to pay attention to, and very limited web access.

Anyway, lots to blog about. Watch this space.

Tags: Just World News

As I have chronicled here and elsewhere many times, over the past decade the once-vibrant movement of Israelis actively working for an end to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza had become increasingly moribund.

Yes, a small number of brave Jewish-Israeli souls participated in the weekly protests in Bil'in, Nabi Saleh, or (more recently) Sheikh Jarrah. A small number continued to undertake other conscience-driven acts to try to challenge the occupation. But the mass movement of anti-occupation activists that one saw in the 1980s and early 1990s dwindled throughout the late 1990s and was then effectively killed off by Ehud Barak in late 2000.

Since then, feeling much more secure behind their Wall (along with all the horrendous battery of associated population-control measures) and also completely insulated from bearing the financial costs of administering the occupation, since the EU and U.S. governments between them have been financing it non-stop since 1994, most of the Jewish-Israeli public seemed to retreat into a form of disengagement that was marked by apathy (at best) or outright anti-Palestinian racism, at worst.

But now, there is something new in the streets of Tel Aviv-- and of Jerusalem and a score of other Israeli cities. Directly inspired by the Arab popular movements of Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere, lower-income Israelis from a broad range of different "ethnic" sectors have taken to the streets in the 'J14' movement to demand affordable housing. And despite the attempts of some of J14's early organizers to keep the agenda "non-political", the Palestinian issue has now entered the heart of the movement in a most revealing way: not via any big endorsement by J14 participants of a slogan to "end the occupation" but by the endorsement by many of them of the principle of Palestinian-Jewish solidarity within Israel.

The sight of that huge, Tahrir Square-inspired, bilingual banner in downtown Tel Aviv is amazing! But the political implications of the J14 movement are also huge-- and could become a lot huger.

Veteran Jewish-Israeli anti-occupation activist Haggai Matar reported this telling vignette from Saturday's very large J14 rally in Tel Aviv (translation Dimi Reider):

Odeh Bisharat, the first Arab to address the mass rallies, greeted the enormous audience before him and reminded them that the struggle for social justice has always been the struggle of the Arab community, which has suffered from inequality, discrimination, state-level racism and house demolitions in Ramle, Lod, Jaffa and Al-Araqib. Not only was this met with ovation from a huge crowd of well over a hundred thousand people, but the masses actually chanted: “Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies.” And later, in a short clip of interviews from protest camps across the country, Jews and Arabs spoke, and a number of them, including even one religious Jew, repeatedly said that “it’s time for this state to be a state for all its citizens.” A state for all its citizens. As a broad, popular demand. Who would have believed it.

"A state for all its citizens" has been, of course, a key organizing demand for that 20% of Israel's citizens who are Palestinian indigenes, throughout the decades. It is, of course, a key principle of democracy anywhere. But until now, Israel's leaders and far too many of its Jewish citizens have insisted that Israel should be, instead, "the state of the Jewish people"-- including all Jewish people, anywhere in the world, any of whom is welcomed and supported to immigrate to Israel and is given citizenship immediately upon doing so.

The 1.2 million Palestinian citizens of Israel (PCOI's) are the descendants of the survivors of the widespread ethnic cleansings that the Jewish/Israeli forces undertook during the Nakba of 1947-48. They are a community has suffered numerous waves and forms of repression since then-- including campaigns of expropriation of their lands and properties that continue to this day. The Israeli authorities (and too many of Israel's acolytes in the western media) have tried to deny the PCOI's Palestinian heritage, referring to them either in general terms as "Israeli Arabs" or segmenting them into "Israeli Bedouins", "Israeli Druze", etc. But by ethnicity and heritage they are as Palestinian as any other Palestinians. Indeed, they are the close cousins of the Palestinian refugees now scattered around the whole world, since by definition the vast majority those refugee families are descended from Palestinians who were expelled from the area that became Israel in 1948.

The PCOI's and the Palestinian refugees have a lot more in common, too. In particular, at the political level, neither group ever had much love for the whole Oslo process-- and they still, to this day, don't have much love for the two-state outcome between Palestinians and Israelis. Both groups form "natural" constituencies for a one-state outcome. The PCOI's, in addition, are distinct because they have lived alongside Jewish Israelis for the past 63 years. They know them very well--for good and ill. They constitute the largest community of non-Jewish speakers of Hebrew in the world, since the Israeli school system forces them to learn a lot of subjects in Hebrew (and also force-feeds them a lot of Jewish history, while requiring little study of the history of their own people in the region.) They thus form a natural spearhead for the movement to re-imagine and rebuild the political order in the region as one that sees a single, unitary and democratic state in the whole of Palestine/Israel: A state, moreover, that honors and protects the language and culture of both of its constituent peoples, equally. (Also, a state that finally allows the millions of exiled Palestinians to exercise their long-denied right of return.)

Of course, we do not know yet where this latest J14 movement in Israel will lead. It may fizzle out completely. It may (as some participants have warned) become "captured" by the forces of the Jewish ethnonationalist right wing in Israel. Or it may mark the beginning of a completely new kind of social movement in Israel that is marked by Palestinian-Jewish solidarity against the forces of the repressive, Likudist status quo.

There has been some speculation that Netnyahu and his cronies in government (Lieberman and Barak) may seek to distract attention from J14's demands by launching a new military adventure. Already over recent days, Israeli warplanes have resumed their earlier patterns of terrorizing and bombing Gaza. (Read Eva Bartlett's searing on-the-ground account of this, here.)

Lieberman has also been mouthing off some very escalatory warnings about "bloodshed ahead" if the PLO leaders take their case for an independent state to the UN in September.

But there are some signs, too, that Netanyahu may be trying another tactic to defuse the pressures coming from J14: Winning the release of five-year Israeli POW Gilad Shalit from Gaza. Netanyahu's negotiator on this matter, Amos Gilead, arrived in Cairo on Sunday for talks.

Conclusion of a deal that wins Shalit's release would almost certainly have some very interesting political fallout on the Palestinian side. Netanyahu's essential negotiation is with Hamas, which has been holding Shalit since it took over Gaza completely in June 2007; and the terms would almost certainly include the release of several hundred of the 7,000 or so Palestinian political prisoners held in Israeli jails. This would strengthen Hamas politically, perhaps by a considerable amount. The Hamas-Fateh reconciliation process announced with some fanfare on May 3 has been moving ahead only very slowly and fitfully since then. Meanwhile, Fateh has continued to be riven by internal factionalism-- most recently, when an internal movement commission of enquiry reported publicly that longtime Fateh strongman (and darling of the western governments) Mohamed Dahlan "had a hand" in the death by poisoning of movement icon Yasser Arafat, in 2004.

Fateh has been closely embraced and given generous financial support by the U.S. and its allies since 1994, and has come to play within the Palestinian national movement something like the role that Renamo played in Mozambique, UNITA in Angola, (or Inkatha in apartheid South Africa.) But it has been visible withering on the vine in recent years, for many reasons but most significantly because of the complete failure of its leaders' strategy of relying wholly on the goodwill of Washington (rather than, for example, any mass-based organizing strategy) to achieve its goal of an independent Palestinian state, established alongside Israel in just 23% of historic Palestine.

A clear Hamas "victory" in the negotiations over Shalit might toll the death-bell for Fateh as an effective political force.

... But who knows what Netanyahu has in mind? All that is clear is that the J14 movement brings the potential for some real political change to both Jews and Palestinians in Israel/Palestine.

Tags: Just World News