Iraq War Timeline
Mother Jones has put together an interesting (and somewhat biased) "lie by lie" interactive timeline of the Iraq War. Check it out.
Who Are Israel's Friends?
Stephen Walt picks up a line you hear frequently in the debate over Israeli military action – that those who oppose the action are actually Israel’s true friends, because stopping a friend from making a mistake is better than reflex cheer leading (which our political leaders engage in unrepentantly).
It’s a valid sentiment to be sure, but it strikes me as essentially conceding the argument to Israel’s reflex boosters. The question isn’t fundamentally “what is or is not good for Israel” because Walt – like me – is not a citizen of Israel. Nor are members of Congress. The proper question is, is their course of action good for American interests. That – and not questions of relative degrees of fidelity to Israel – needs to the be locus of the debate.
Indeed, framing your criticism as coming from a friend of Israel, already concedes the important premise that the proper lens to view these events are Israel’s – not America’s. It makes the important assumption that American and Israeli interests (and enemies) are identical.
Better Realists, Please
Not content to hurt my brain the first time around, Stephen Walt presents us with another "thought experiment":
But if you don't like that "thought experiment," here's another, offered by philosophy professor Joseph Levine at University of Massachusetts: what if Hamas was hiding out among the civilian population of Tel Aviv, and attacking Israel from within? Would the IDF be using massive force to eradicate them? Unless you think that Palestinian and Israeli civilian lives are not equal, what justifies the current policy?Israel is hardly unique in placing a higher value on its own citizens' lives than it places on the lives of others, and we should not forget that U.S. forces have caused plenty of civilian casualties in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. "The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must." But that doesn't make it right, and there are good reasons to question whether it will even be effective in this instance.
There's so much that's very wrong with this hypothetical scenario. First, as a well regarded realist, you'd think Walt could appreciate the fact that the Israeli government - or any government, for that matter - is first and foremost responsible for the well-being of its own citizenry. If Hamas were embedded within an Israeli city it would of course change the retaliatory options. The IDF is charged with the security of Israelis, not the citizens of the world. Walt admits as much.
I'm inclined to agree with Ross Douthat on this, who rightly argues for a new kind of realism in the realm of foreign policy. What often passes as such in contemporary forums is nothing more than misplaced and misguided contrarianism.
Israel's 'Right' to Defend Herself
Israel's "right to defend herself" has taken the lives of over 500 Palestinians and up to 120 (roughly over 20 percent) of those are children. Home-made rockets from Hamas have killed 20 Israelis in eight years and approximately four Israelis have been killed during the current conflict. Robert Fisk sums it up nicely in his piece for the Independent:
We've got so used to the carnage of the Middle East that we don't care any more – providing we don't offend the Israelis. It's not clear how many of the Gaza dead are civilians, but the response of the Bush administration, not to mention the pusillanimous reaction of Gordon Brown, reaffirm for Arabs what they have known for decades: however they struggle against their antagonists, the West will take Israel's side. As usual, the bloodbath was the fault of the Arabs – who, as we all know, only understand force. ... And we demand security for Israel – rightly – but overlook this massive and utterly disproportionate slaughter by Israel. It was Madeleine Albright who once said that Israel was "under siege" – as if Palestinian tanks were in the streets of Tel Aviv.
The fact remains that Israel has carried out its response to Hamas rocket fire with unbridled brutality and it is the Gazans who bear the brunt of this response. Those same Gazans who have been suffering under Israel's economic and aid embargo over the past year. It is safe to say that the Palestinians in Gaza have known nothing but misery over the past year and the so-called "international community" has remained impotent in the face of suffering. During the past few days, according to a Palestinian legislator on CNN's Rick Sanchez, 17 entire families have been wiped out in Gaza.
Bolivia Launches State-Run Media
The headline reads, Morales says Bolivia to launch state newspaper, and a TV station, both bankrolled by Iran and Venezuela.
Noticias 24 also had the news, and quoted Evo Morales (my translation),
"We will have our own television channel, that's also a lot of money that we have to invest, and this channel wil serve to incorporate the state network to inform and educate."Evo also said the paper will counterbalance the local media, even when the Bolivian government already runs
a news agency, a television station, a weekly paper and a network of radio stations.Morales, who visited Iran last September, decided last month to no longer hold press conferences for the local media. which he considers "biased".
Iranian and Venezuelan financing, however, meets his criteria.
Fausta Wertz also blogs at faustasblog.com.
Stephen Walt Confuses Me
Stephen Walt - sporting his new blog over at Foreign Policy - asks his readers to consider the following:
Imagine that Egypt, Jordan, and Syria had won the Six Day War, leading to a massive exodus of Jews from the territory of Israel. Imagine that the victorious Arab states had eventually decided to permit the Palestinians to establish a state of their own on the territory of the former Jewish state. (That's unlikely, of course, but this is a thought experiment). Imagine that a million or so Jews had ended up as stateless refugees confined to that narrow enclave known as the Gaza Strip. Then imagine that a group of hardline Orthodox Jews took over control of that territory and organized a resistance movement. They also steadfastly refused to recognize the new Palestinian state, arguing that its creation was illegal and that their expulsion from Israel was unjust. Imagine that they obtained backing from sympathizers around the world and that they began to smuggle weapons into the territory. Then imagine that they started firing at Palestinian towns and villages and refused to stop despite continued reprisals and civilian casualties.Here's the question: would the United States be denouncing those Jews in Gaza as "terrorists" and encouraging the Palestinian state to use overwhelming force against them?
Here's another: would the United States have even allowed such a situation to arise and persist in the first place?
This hypothetical strikes me as a bit odd and simplistic. First off, we needn't start with an unrealistic mental experiment in 1967, since there had always been a group of "hardline Orthodox Jews" living in the Gaza Strip. This small, ancient group - which preceded the first Aliyah (major wave of Jewish immigration) by many, many years - didn't form large militias and kill innocent civilians (this is, of course, a cursory glance at the history, but we're already dealing with a rather unlikely and sweeping hypothetical anyway).
There's too much historical oversight to even begin considering Walt's questions. If the Palestinians were handed all of the land then they'd have been in violation of multiple UN edicts and mandates. Why would the international community even let it get to the point where a group of "hardline Orthodox Jews" were conducting acts of terror against the ruling state? Wouldn't said state be made illegitimate by the partition of 1947? Doesn't the UN seek a return to the '67 borders, thus acknowledging a sovereign Israeli state?
I'm at a loss, maybe Professor Walt can help me out here ...
UPDATE: Even Ezra Klein (kind of) agrees!
Israel's Ticking Clock
I suspect Max Boot and Juan Cole don't agree on much, but reading their respective takes on Israel's war in Gaza does bring you to the same conclusion: Israel is in a deep bind, both in the short term but especially over the long term.
There has been talk lately that Israel was doing the incoming Obama administration a "favor" by taking Hamas out of the equation, thereby paving the road to a renewed peace process. It could be the exact opposite. By taking military action now, Israel may be demonstrating how untenable its long term prospects are and affirming in the minds of her enemies that time is on their side (see Cole on the demographic details).
Israel cannot extirpate every Hamas member in Gaza without, as Boot writes, resorting to tactics that it and the world would rightly find abhorrent. But they can cause enough damage to ensure that the residents of Gaza are even less amenable to a negotiated settlement than before - a settlement that everyone recognizes is the ultimate path toward security for Israel and statehood for the Palestinians. Gaza - the security problem for Israel and the governance problem for the 1.5 million Palestinians that reside there - does not go away when (or if) the IDF withdraws.
It's the Administration, Stupid
Matthew Yglesias considers a post-Hamas Gaza:
something you need to look at here is the risk that weakening Hamas will only lead to the rise of more extreme groups. The high level of power that Hamas had achieved as of last week was, after all, precisely the result of a deliberate Israeli campaign to weaken Fatah. The hope was that this would bring some more accommodationist Palestinians to the fore, but instead the reverse happened. And now that Israel is going about trying the same thing with Hamas, one needs to worry that Hamas will be displaced by Salafist groups who think Hamas is too weak-kneed.
This is a fair concern, but I find this Salafist argument to be highly unlikely. Hamas, after all, was put in power for very pragmatic purposes. The idea that Gazans elected Hamas to power as one component in the reinstatement of a creeping 'global caliphate' has been grossly exaggerated. At the end of the day, it's a question of administration and honesty. Hamas is a vast network of politicians, militants and social servants. They were ultimately given power because Fatah had proven too corrupt and too divisive to govern (which, incidentally, they are).
This is what differentiates Hamas from Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and PIJ from radical Salafists hellbent on strict Koranic doctrine. They all share a level of extremism, but Hamas is the only one of the three that has presented a governing platform that actually enjoyed popular support.
As we've learned in Afghanistan, Iraq, and even Somalia, it's stability and steady governance that often make Islamic radicals an attractive option to their usually more corrupt and autocratic alternatives. But radical groups without legitimate means to administer such government are doomed to failure (as we saw in the horrid form of "governance" Al-Qaeda implemented in Ramadi).
Israel has held to pretty limited goals since initiating the Gaza assault, and I've seen no indication that it expects to completely scrub Hamas from the territory. Clearly, there will be leaders and militants left behind to pick up the pieces and rebuild. I highly doubt, however, that Gaza will be left to an even further fringe.
For a more thoughtful analysis on the political implications of supplanting Hamas, please check out our friend and RCW contributor Meir Javedanfar.
Cuba: A Photograph as Metaphor
Cuba celebrated fifty years of its Communist Revolution the other day. It was a subdued celebration, as befits a celebration where the locals were not invited, and where the anniversary is marked by grief.
I was doing a roundup of posts for my blog's Monday Carnival of Latin America and the Caribbean when I came across this image:
The rusted wrought-iron balconies and fading handcrafted doors look back to an older era of artisanship and pride of ownership, now gone. Paint colors from decades ago, stucco coming apart from the wall, graffiti and mold, signal decay and pain.
Hope has bypassed that wall.
The photograph is in an article about Steven Soderbergh's latest movie, Che, but it is emblematic of today's Cuba: the only recent paint that building has seen is the iconic figure of Che (most prominently the Korda photo), whose myth and fiction override the reality of the hundreds of people he killed:
But a glance beneath the surface glamour of Alberto Korda's 1960 beret-and-curls photograph of Guevara is enough to expose the less-than-romantic reality. At the time he posed for Korda's camera, Guevara was jailer and executioner-in-chief of Castro's dictatorship. As boss of the notorious La Cabaña prison in Havana, he supervised the detention, interrogation, summary trials and executions of hundreds of "class enemies".The building it's painted on, like hundreds of other buildings in Cuba, won't be restored, or for that matter, brought back to minimum standards because it's not a tourist destination or owned by a Communist Party big-shot. Since in Cuba only the state has the right to sell property, and the average wage is $20 a month, the only way that building got new paint was a picture of Che. Like the Revolución, even that image is showing cracks.We know from Ernest Hemingway – then a Cuban resident – what Che was up to. Hemingway, who had looked kindly on leftist revolutions since the Spanish civil war, invited his friend George Plimpton, editor of the Paris Review, to witness the shooting of prisoners condemned by the tribunals under Guevara's control. They watched as the men were trucked in, unloaded, shot, and taken away. As a result, Plimpton later refused to publish Guevara's memoir, The Motorcycle Diaries.
There have been some 16,000 such executions since the Castro brothers, Guevara and their merry men swept into Havana in January 1959. About 100,000 Cubans who have fallen foul of the regime have been jailed. Two million others have succeeded in escaping Castro's socialist paradise, while an estimated 30,000 have died in the attempt.
The woman in front of the building looks at the contents of a small shopping bag, where she may be carrying the meager rations that Fidel Castro introduced in the country in 1962, rations that compare to that which Cuban slaves received in the 1840s.
A month's rations would fit in that bag.
Of course there's a propaganda aspect, and the Cuban government places the blame for nearly everything on the USA and the embargo, el bloqueo, even when the US is Cuba's #5 trading partner according to the Cuban government's own figures:
Trade data for 2007 posted on the website of Cuba's National Statistics Office placed the U.S. fifth at $582 million, compared with $484 million in 2006, including shipping costs.By the way, food and medicine were never subject to the embargo.
The huge painting of the Che image is on a wall that has been decaying for decades, as the Revolución that brought it.
Fausta Wertz also blogs at faustasblog.com.
Gaza Conjecture
Matt Yglesias on the Gaza ground invasion:
Whatever you think of the merits of this step, I think we can take it as implicit acknowledgment by the IDF that the past week’s worth of air strikes were, though deadly to the people killed or maimed by high explosive and flying rubble, basically useless and undertaken without real strategy.
Except that the ground invasion was in fact approved last week.
Iran's Gaza Strategy
The recent flare up in Gaza is causing more anger in the Iranian government. There have been several demonstrations, including the burning down of the Benetton shop in Tehran and recruitment of suicide bombers. The Iranian government has also embarked on setting up a tribunal to try Israeli officials and has called for more stringent boycotting of companies who do business with Israel.
These demonstrations and calls for help are directed by Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. He is ultimately in charge of Iran's policy, and as such acts would not be under taken without his permission. There are a number of reasons behind his current strategy:
1. To pressure Western governments to put an end to Hamas's destruction. Khamenei is trying to say to them that we don't have a border with Israel, but our anger should be taken into consideration, because we are a new power in the region and our opinion should be taken seriously.
2. There is also the question of Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Iran sees both of them as trying to muscle in on Gaza, an area which Tehran considers as its sole sphere of influence. To Tehran's anger, the Egyptians are not budging. Khamenei is hoping that through public gestures such as setting up courts to try Israeli officials, the Egyptian public would feel encouraged, and thus would place pressure on Mubarak to help Hamas.
3. Iran is an Islamic Republic. Compared to all of the chants we used to shout as children (Death to America, USSR, Saddam,) the only one Iran is still holding true to is 'Death to Israel.' Without it, the regime would lose the last revolutionary DNA which holds its identity together.
4. Iran is trying to be the leader of the Islamic world. Khamenei believes that the majority of the Islamic world is angry about what is happening in Gaza, and he is right. He sees the Muslim government's silence as being against the wishes of locals. By saying what he believes Muslims feel world wide, he is trying to be their representative. There is of course no free lunch. In return his hope is that they will get their government to back Iran's nuclear program.
The one person who has the most to gain is President Ahmadinejad. He has just submitted a controversial bill to the Majlis to cut state subsidies. This will make him even more unpopular. The Gaza affair is a gift to him, which he will use to distract the Iranian people from the economic pain which is about to hit them.
Meir Javedanfar also blogs at The Middle East Analyst.
The 2008 Numbers in Iraq & Afghanistan
According to a tally by The Associated Press, at least 314 U.S. soldiers died in Iraq in 2008, down from 904 in the previous year. In all, at least 4,221 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq since the war began in 2003.For Iraqis, the plunge was also marked: During 2008, at least 7,496 Iraqis died in war-related violence according to an AP count, including 6,068 civilians and 1,428 security personnel, down 60 percent from 2007...
...In Afghanistan, 151 U.S. soldiers died in 2008, compared with 111 in the previous year, according to an AP tally. The count recorded 1,160 civilians killed in insurgency-related violence, up from 875.
At least 625 U.S. soldiers have died because of the war in Afghanistan since the fighting began in 2001.
The AP count is based on figures from Afghan, U.S. and NATO officials.
The combined total of at least 465 U.S. deaths in both Iraq and Afghanistan for 2008 is the lowest combined total for both wars since 2003, when the U.S. invaded Iraq.
Here's hoping for further improvements in 2009.
Public Opinion on Gaza War
Rasmussen Reports has some numbers:
Forty-four percent (44%) say Israel should have taken military action against the Palestinians, but 41% say it should have tried to find a diplomatic solution to the problems there, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Fifteen percent (15%) are undecided.Fifty-five percent (55%) of adults, however, believe the Palestinians are to blame for the current situation in Gaza, while 13% point the finger at the Israelis. Nearly one-third (32%) aren’t sure.
The American public seems much more closely divided on this issue than I would have thought.
Who Is Hamas Targeting?
The end of the Gaza ceasefire brought an intensification of rocket fire by Hamas, and subsequent air strikes by Israel. A ground incursion into Gaza over the next few days is more than likely as Israel has already stated that this is an "all-out war." The Bush administration is urging Hamas to cease its rocket attacks if it wants peace, while France and the EU have condemned Israel's disproportionate use of force. And where are the Arab leaders? Same place as usual--no man's land.
But at the end of the day, what does Hamas really want to get out of this? I agree with those who believe that Israel's response has been heavy-handed as usual; with what seems to be a disregard for basic human rights. I can also understand why people feel the same way about Hamas firing rockets into Israeli territory. Hamas knows to expect severe retaliation from Israel, but at the same time Israel's reaction seemed premeditated.
Hamas' actions are legitimized by its supporters because of Israel's perceived inhumane treatment of the Palestinian people. Israel's supporters legitimize their behavior because of Hamas' and other Palestinian factions' desperate attacks on Israel's civilian population.
Venezuela: 2008 in Review
The big news of the year in Latin America undoubtedly was the successful rescue operation carried out by the Colombian military, which released French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt, Americans Thomas Howes, Keith Stansell and Marc Gonsalves, and eleven Colombian officers and NCOs. The success of this operation, which required near perfect execution by a military that only a few years ago could rarely be trusted, dealt a blow to Hugo Chavez’s dream of a Bolivarian empire in Latin America and changed the balance of power in the region away from Chavez. By year's end, Brazil also gained a much higher profile, stealing the limelight from Chavez by becoming a diplomatic power.
But let’s start in January:
The price of oil at the beginning of the year was $100 for Texas crude. In December 2007 Hugo Chavez had lost a referendum on amending the Venezuelan constitution which would have granted him unlimited terms and nearly unlimited powers. People were still using “Por que no te callas” ringtones in their cell phones. The best-selling ringtone used King Juan Carlos’s of Spain’s retort, and relations between Spain and Venezuela had become strained. At year's start, Chavez was proposing the rescue of three hostages, which was rumored to involve the payment of $500 million. The rescue did go through, but not as planned. The son of one of the women, who supposedly was going to be released at that time, not only had already been released, but was living in a Bogota orphanage.