EX-COMBATANT PEACE PROMOTERS, AND A CARDINAL: The first two substantive days of the research here in Mozambique have been going very well. Plus, my new research assistant (and elder daughter) Leila Rached joined me here on Sunday afternoon. It is a real blast having her here working with me! And in our hours off, the two of us are able to do various things around town that I alone, as a foreign woman, would be much more hesitant about doing. Yesterday morning, project research associate Salomao Mungoi took us along for a long discussion with his boss Jacinta Jorge, the head of an organization of ex-combatant peace promters called ProPaz. ProPaz is such an amazing and inspiring organization! It has more than 100 former combatants (from the civil-war era) who currently provide peacebuilding and conflict-resolution/transformation services in four of the country's provinces. It includes former fighters with the government (Frelimo) forces alongside former fighters from the insurgent (Renamo) side-- working together these days. ProPaz was founded by two of the main organizations of former combatants from Mozambique's punishing, 17-year civil war: AMODEG, a general veterans' group, and ADEMIMO, an organization of disabled former fighters. We (well actually, Leila) took pages and pages of notes from our discussion with Jacinta. She told us a little about her own personal journey through having been virtually "tricked" into serving in the country's armed forces when she was still a teenager, through her rise in responsibilities in the officer corps (including the stresses of trying to raise a child alone while her husband was at the front-line) -- to her eventual demobilization. She told us that AMODEG had started out as an organization only for former soldiers in the Frelimo (government) armed forces. But that even before the Frelimo and Renamo leaders had signed their nationwide peace accord in October 1992, AMODEG had decided to take in former fighters from Renamo as well, and had changed its name accordingly. I reflected a little on my recent experiences at ICTR, and with the Rwandan issue more broadly, and asked Jacinta whether she thought that the people who had committed the many atrocities that marked her country's civil war should also have been punished. Firstly, she responded by coming back to me with another question. "If they were punished, would that bring an end to the war, or prevent another war from happening?" she asked. Then, she said it was actually important not to judge people for what they had done during the war, since their participation in it was often obligatory, not voluntary. Finally she noted that no amount of reparations could replace the lives or limbs lost during the war. So I guess that adds up to a "no." But what a wise person she is. "During a war, both sides are blind to the dimensions of the violence they are inflicting on the other side," she said. "People may say at the political level that there is 'bad' war and 'good' war. But war is war, and it always results in the killing of people." In the afternoon (still on Monday), we went to the AMODEG heaquarters, which are located on a site that used to be a logistics headquarters for the army diring the civil war -- and that a long time before that had played a historic role in the pre-independence foundations of Frelimo. Now, the roof of the main building on the site, a lovely old Portuguese colonial mansion, has long since fallen in. AMODEG's office is in a squat, more recently built block of offices behind the old mansion. And behind the office was a playground, where during our conversation tw dozen high-spirited md-teens were having a rowdy and enjoyable game of soccer. That seemed appropriate, because one of the questions I was asking the four civil war veterans seated with us was how they talked about the events of the war with their own children. By and large, they said they didn't do so. "There are so many ugly things happen in war," one of them said, "that we really doin't want to alk about them with our families." One of the things I'm asking people during this phase of the research-- especially people who have had close-up experience of war and violence-- is what priorities they would establish for societies that are just emerging from recent episodes of atrocious violence. An AMODEG board member was the first to reply: "psycho-social rehabilitation should be the priority," he said. "Both for individuals, and collectively." When the Mozambican parties reached their peace acord in 1992, the UN invested significant amonts of money and attention in trying to help the process of demobilizing former combatants and then helping them reintegrate into society. (I say "significant", though of course the amounts of money involved in helping deal with more than 90,000 former combatants here absolutely paled in comparison with the billion-plus dollars invested thus far in trying just 50 or so people from rwanda in ICTR.) I asked the friends gathered at the AMODEG office whether they thought-- ten years after the fact-- that this UN program had been helpful. "The main gain we got from the whole event was the coming of peace itself," one AMODEG activist told me. "Because people were so tired of war!" Again, I asked them if they thought people should have been tried and punished for what they did during the war. "It wouldn't have made any sense in our situation," one said, "because everyone would have been in court!" This morning, we went to see Cardinal Alexander Dos Santos, the frail but ethereal leader of Mozambique's Catholic church. He had played a historic role, back in 1988-89, in finding a way for the leaders of both Frelimo and Renamo finally to sit down together and start negotiating a final peace. Dos Santos received us in an upstairs office in his leafy headquarters compound. It was a short meeting, but Leila and I both felt we were in the presence of serene, humorous, grandfatherly, and almost saint-like figure. He laughed as he recalled a visit he and Archbishop Tutu had paid to the US in 1988, when their mission had been to try to persuade the Reagan administration that the frelimo government was not nearly as "communistic" as it had been painted. recalling the overall process of peacemaking in Mozambique, he said all the churches had had a special role to play: "We had to work hard to create an image of all Mozambicans living together, rather than fighting," he said. But he immediately aded that actually the task had not proved so dificult. "When Frelimo came back from the bush-- well, they might know that this or that person might have killed someone-- but it's finished!" he said. ... All these conversations I'm having here seem to underscore the validity of the judgment that anthropologist Carolyn Nordstrom expressed in her fabulous book about Mozambique's civil war, "A Different Kind of War Story." "The citizens in Mozambique demonstrated the most sophisticated country-wide conflict resolution practices and ideologies I have observed anywhere in the world." (p.11) Of course, I'm trying not to go into these encounters with my mind already made up from my previous reading and my one very short earlier vsit to Mozambique. I'm going to continue to look for counter-evidence. But in the meantime, continuing to explore the various different dimensions of Mozambican people's "conflict resolution practices and ideologies" is something that I'm definitely committed to doing here.

MAPUTO AVENIDAS: Overcast today, so I was able to go for a nice long walk this morning after the going-to-church plans fell through. I walked over to the lovely broad esplanade that runs along the east (Indian Ocean) side of the old city center, suspended some 80 feet or so up a steep but verdant cliff above the beach-side road below. The esplanade is now called Avenida Friedrich Engels. I imagine it was once called Avenida Salazar or something like that-- back when the city itself was called Lourenco Marques. It was very quiet. I saw several people out walking, but only one jogger: male, black, in bike shorts. I wonder what people would think if tomorrow morning they saw a female, white jogger out there in regular running shorts. Maybe I could jog in long pants? Okay, call me a sentamentalist, but I think it's rather poignant to walk along streets named after the icons of Mozambique's liberation era. There are Avenidas named after Karl Marx and Mao Tse Tung, as well as Engels. So here's Mozambique, a country that is gamely trying to go along with all the World Bank and IMF plans for nassive "structural adjustment" that basically involves dismantling many social programs and the nationalized industries and opening the econ/IMF have NOT yet forced them to rename their streets after Milton Friedman or Friedrich Hayek. Thank goodness! (It may yet come.) And another thing. here in Maputo, as in Dar s-Salaam, I've noticed many main streets named after non-native heroes of the African liberation era. Julius Nyerere, Ahmed Sekou Toure, Albert Luthuli, etc etc. But how come you never seem to see that same relaxed but generous mak of inter-country respect being offered in Arab capital cities? I think the answer has to do with the inter-twined nature of Arab politics, and the still unformed, or at any rate potentially precarious, state of the Arab "state system". That's why, if the mayor of Damascus, say, chose to name a big street after Nasser or Gadhafi or Ibn Saud, this act would immediately be seen as having suspect political motives.... Better to stick to long-gone heroes of the Arab past! I think it's rather nice that so many African countries' elites feel able to celebrate each other's national heroes and (by inference) each other's liberation narratives. And talking about celebrating other people's narratives, when do you think we'll get a Nelson Mandela Street or an Olaf palme Street or whatever in Washington DC. The only streets I recall there named after furrners are Raoul Wallenberg Place (a small street that was was thus renamed mainly to annoy the Soviets whose embassy is right there), and of course L'Enfant Plaza. Neither of those really celebrates another country's national narrative... All we seem to be getting in DC and the rest of the USA these days, in the renaming of public spaces department, is endless Ronald reagan this's and thats.

TO MAPUTO: Yesterday, I woke up in a city-center hotel in Dar es-Salaam (the capital of Tanzania); I took the promised walk to and along the waterfront; did a bit of email back at the hotel ($1.50/hour); went back to the airport. The Linhas Aereas de Mocambique flight to Maputo took off not just on time, but actually five minutes early. The first portion of the flight was more or less down the eastern coast of Africa. I could see some scattered towns and roads, a few airstrips, some areas with a lot of small cultivated plots-- and a LOT of forest. We had a half-hour stopover in Pemba, which is the capital of Mozambique's northern 'Cabo del Gado' province. It looked like a super place as we flew over the city-- perched out on a peninsula in the sparkling blue sea. And then on, and on, and on we flew, down the length of the country (which is a big one!), to Maputo. No hassles at the airport. I got a cab very easily, and came down to the Hotel Terminus. The hotel is quite a lot fancier than I had expected or, probably, needed. But they have free dial-up internet in the rooms and a really inviting-looking pool surrounded by--you guessed it-- waving palm-trees and riotously multi-colored bougainvillea. So I think Leila and I will have a great home-base here while we work on the research. This morning, my research associate, Salomao Mungoi, came by. We'd only communicated previously by email, so it was great to meet him. He's a program officer with an association of ex-combatants (from the civil war era) called ProPaz. He speaks fabulous English-- along with Portuguese, Spanish, his mother tongue, and probably a few more Mozambican indigenous languages. A few things Salomao told me during our time together this morning were really striking. The first, which struck me particularly because I have so recently been at the ICTR in Arusha, was that sometimes these days in Mozambique it's kind of hard to remember who was a displaced person, or a child soldier, or sometimes even which side people were fighting on, back during the civil war. This struck me precisely because of the strong contrast it presents with the situation in the ICTR, where people are delving and delving to try to dredge up and establish minor details of remembered fact-- not just about who did what to whom on a certain day in, say, June of 1994-- but also about what color car was he driving; did he turn left or right at the intersection; etc etc. (Well, those were the kinds of details I saw being discussed during my days in the courtroom. On other days, the details are much more disturbing: did the accused stand by while such-and-such a woman was being raped, or being penetrated sexually with a stick by the marauders... How could you tell it was that woman, or another... Etc., etc... day after mind-numbing day of questioning about-- and therefore, to a certain extent, the bringing-back-to-life of-- such details.) But here, "It's kind of hard to remember, sometimes," Salomao told me with a smile and a shrug. "People really don't dwell on it you know." The Mozambican civil war, which was marked by some truly terrible atrocities, was brought to an end with a peace agreement in October 1992. By and large, the policy approach at the time, as also the attitude of the vast majority of Mozambicans, was that it was then time to turn a new leaf; to get on with normal (= peaceable and productive) life; and by and large, after some necessary exorcizing of the spirit of violence that the war had brought into their communities, to then let bygones be bygones. A second thing he said that really struck me was that not long ago, ProPaz had organized a joint training, for something to do with small-arms control and reduction, with some colleagues from the KaZulu region of South Africa who were also ex-combatants. ProPaz was helping to organize the accommodation, in some kind of a Red Cross center here near Maupto... "And we naturally put many of the South Africans together into one of the little houses on the compound. But they were surprised. There were people from both Inkatha and the ANC there, and they'd been working together in these joint projects in KwaZulu for quite a long while already. But they'd never slept in the same house together before. They were sort of scared at first. But they got along just fine: they were sitting and eating, and smoking, and talking together like it was no bigt deal." Gosh, actually, I learned a lot from Salomao this morning, and I can't write it about it all here. Firstly, it would take a lot of time. Secondly--and more importantly-- he actually explained to me that when ProPaz staff members are doing trainings in conflict resolution or other things in some of the distant parts of the country, one of the things they have learned is that it is better NOT to use a pen and paper to take notes or minutes-- that the participants might often feel that "secret" notes are being taken, and just clam up or be hesitant about participating. "Flip charts are much better," he said. "Then, the ones who can read can see what records are being kept and reassure everyone else." So here's my question to myself. This blog: is it more like pen-and-paper (private) minutes, or more like a flipchart? I like to think it's more like a flipchart. A public mind, or whatever. But shouldn't I ask Salomao before I post more items about him; get his permission; maybe figure out a few ground-rules?? Well, I'm still feeling my way here. Suggestions from others in the blogger community would be great...

THOUGHTS ON THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL TRIBUNAL FOR RWANDA: I'll confess right here that I am still at only a very preliminary stage in trying to organize all the impressions I gained, all the interviews I undertook, all the great discussions I had, during my eight days of work at ICTR. Yesterday turned out to be another gala day in terms of interviews. I had really substantive interviews with two judges-- one of them Erik Mose, a Norwegian human-rights lawyer and international-law specialist who's the Deputy President of ICTR-- and with an intriguing prosecution lawyer called Simone Monasebian. I also had good discussions with a defense-team legal assistant who is a Rwandan national and with Tribunal spokesperson Roland Amoussouga. Judge Mose, I got into an extremely interesting discussion with. Then 90 minutes into it, I suddenly realized I might be late for my next discussion, so I had to pry myself out of his office. He was an ardent, hyper-articulate defender of the Tribunal's record. But still... Eleven cases completed in, effectively seven years of operation? (One of those was "completed" arlier this year when the defendant, an Anglican bishop, died before his trial had even opened.) And a tribunal with, in the present year's budget, 872 staff members and an annual budget of $177 million? Mose's argument was, in broad terms, that because the Rwandan genocidaires did not (unlike say the Nazis or the Khmers Rouges) leave extensive documentary records of their atrocities, therefore the cases against the leading genocidaires on trial in Arusha have to be painstakingly built up from witness testimony. And this necessarily takes time. Thus, for example, in the "media trial" of three accused leaders of Rwanda's hate media who are accused of incitement to genocide as well as conspiracy to commit genocide and some other charges, the prosecution has called no fewer than 47 witnesses. Mose said he considered such numbers of witnesses not excessive; rather, he saw these witnesses as supplementing and bolstering each other's testimony... Most witnesses testify in Kinyarwanda, a language that none of the judges or attorneys speaks. So all the statements, examinations, cross-examinations etc have to go through interpretation, which involves considerable time-lags. Thus, the "media trial" for which Mose is one of the three judges recently completed its 229th day of open-court hearings; and as far as I can gather, the defense has only just started to make its case. Or rather, since there are three defendants and each is entitled to mount his own defense, call his own witnesses, etc., I should say that the defense has only just started to make its cases. And those are not 229 consecutive work-days in the courtroom. Since each of ICTR's three chambers is conducting two major trials more or less concurrently-- or rather, sort of fortnight and fortnight about-- and what with other delays, etc-- the "media trial" has been running since, (I need to check this) around the summer of 2000. There are some defendants in the UN's special Detainment Facility near Arusha airport who have been in custody since 1998 or 1999 whose trials have not yet even started. Delay is definitely an issue in the quality of the justice provided by the Court. It is an issue that not only affects the rights of the detainees-- who may yet, of course, join the one defendant whom the court has thus far found "not guilty". But the delay also affects the quality of the trials themselves. It sort of feeds upon itself, compounding the problems of memory lapses and general administrative confusion at every turn. I sat in on one trial, the "Kajelijeli trial", of just one defendant, Mr. Kajelijeli, where at least two excuriciatingly lengthy trial days seemed to be devoted solely to resolving some question regarding what Mr. K had or had not told prosecution investigators on that day he was arrested, in Benin, in June 1998. So, while the folks involkved in that exchange couldn't fully remember who said what to whom in 1998, they hadn't even started getting to the issue of who did what to whom in 1994.... In that case, defense attorney Lennox Hinds pointed out that earlier, the prosecution had claimed in open court that there were no tapes of the 1998 questioning of Mr. K., but that later, the tapes in question had been found and produced. The prosecuting attorney noted that she had not been on the case at that point and did not have any recollection of what had happened rgarding the tapes. Everything seemed incredibly slapdash and complicated. At one point the defendant himself interjected with a suggestion as to how the presiding judge, Judge Sekule, could resolve a certain question.... As Sekule seemed to be completely losing his grip on the court's time, one of his colleagues on the bench, Judge Maqutu, seemed clearly to be asleep. Understandable, perhaps, given the extreme lengthiness and basic argumentative irrelevance of most of the proceedings at this point. But still, absolutely inexcusable. (One attorney told me it is not only the judges who sometimes seem to sleep, but that lead attorneys for both defense and prosecution teams have also been known to do so.) ICTR and its sister-tribunal for former Yugoslavia have been hailed as institutions that are blazing new trails in the development of international criminal law. If that's the case, it might be a good idea for more of us to examine whether these are trails that we necessarily want to be taking. The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg heard, as far as I recall, 22 or 23 cases in ten months. The four principal judges spent a short time reaching and writing their judgments. There was then a hasty period of consultation (though notably NO appeals process), and then, less than one year after the trial had opened, the sentences were executed. (In around half the cases, that meant that the men themselves were executed. For the rest, there were lengthy prison sentences; but also three acquittals.) End of story. The Allies set about rebuilding Germany. The findings regarding "criminal organizations" that had been made by the IMT were used to administer administrative sanctions against the thousands of relevant members of those organizations, to help with a general program of de-Nazification. But basically, nine years after the end of WW2, the Nuremberg Trials were ancient history, and Germany was well on its way to achieiving the vaunted "economic miracle" of its post-war years. What Nuremberg by common consent lacked in terms of due-process protections for the defendants, it more than made up for by providing an expeditious judicial process. Now, nine years after the Rwandan genocide, the country is still held largely in the grip of the many cruel legacies of that event. Responsibility for this state of affairs should probably be shared in some proportion between the country's national government and an "international community" that in 1994 notably failed to intervene to stop the genocide (which all signatories of the 1948 Genocide Convention, including the United States, were contractually obligated to do), but which eagerly leapt onto the "international courts" bandwagon right after the genocide in an attempt to "use" this case in order to push forward the agenda of international criminal law. (As well as to assuage some guilt on behalf of citizens of northern nations that had done nothing to stop the genocide.) Whether ICTR has, in sum, helped or imposed additional harm on the Rwandans is one of the things I've been trying to find out with my research. Of all the people I talked to in Arusha-- prosecution attorneys, defense attorneys, Rwandans, "internationals", journalists, court officers-- only Judge Mose and ICTR/ICTY Chief Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte definitely stated that they thought ICTR had been helpful to the Rwandans. Everyone else whom I asked about this specific issue ended up giving a far more guarded, nuanced, or even downright critical judgment. I even heard plenty of caveats expressed by a member of the prosecution team, who told me that early idealism about joining this ground-breaking project had now been supplemented by an interest in making a further move in the future, and going to work with Rwanda's "alternative justice" program, the gacaca courts... Well, there are plenty of other issues I want to write about, with regard to ICTR. I promised my editor at the Christian Science Monitor that I'd get something to her about the court "soon-ish". Trying to choose what to say in my regular 800-word column looks like a huge challenge. After that, I'll try to spin off a nice long think piece for Boston Review. I love writing for them. The editors there are totally sharp and on-the-ball. (I know that, because they always say they like my writing. I mean, isn't that the best criterion for "sharpness" that there is??) But I also somewhere along the way have to write all of my Rwandan-justice material up as a chapter of the book I'm supposed to be writing. That includes all the fabulous, thus far barely exploited material that I gathered during my rsearch visit to Rwanda, last year. As well as all this new material. And I need to put all that into one chapter???? Helena, you have to be kidding. Oh, and did I tell you that I am going to be plunging myself into Mozambique tomorrow?

DAR ES-SALAAM: When my travel agent, Alaina, told me that various flight schedules had been changed and I could not any longer fly from Arusha, Tanzania to Maputo, Mozambique in a single day, at first I felt really frustrated. I mean! For goodness sake! This would cut a whole workday off my valuable schedule! Etc.! Then I got a grip and thought, wow, it's amazing I can do this whole four-location research trip with as much amazing convenience as I still have. I should stop whingeing. Besides, I've never been to Dar Es-Salaam before, so maybe an overnight here would be fun? Well, I'm here. I'm not sure about fun, yet-- I've been holed up in a hotel room writing a slightly overdue column for Al-Hayat. (Hey, wouldn't you just know that while I'm really getting into this Africa project, Syria suddenly becomes a big subject? The Lehrer Newshour on the phone; my editor at the CSM graciously asking me if I want to write about Syria for her; etc etc? If you, my devoted reader, want to see the most recent thing I wrote about Syria, check out the link I have in the column to the right, to my recent Boston Review piece on the subject.) Anyway, tomorrow I'll go out and look for the seafront or something. Basically, so far, all the travel arrangements have been working amazingly well. This morning, my last in Arusha, I had a really good meeting with Martin Ngoga, who's the Rwandan government's "representative" to the ICTR. (Also, a Rwandan diplomat accredited to the Govt of Tanzania.) I said some sad farewells to two of the people who helped me find my way around ICTR: Gabi Gabiroz, of Hirondelle, and ICTR public-affairs officer Straton Musonera. Then I went back to the dear old Impala Hotel to await the shuttle bus to Kilimanjaro that had been promised when I went by the Air Tanzania office last week. What with the worries Gabi and others had expressed about whether Air Tanzania still existed this week, etc, plus a lot of pessimism-- expressed by, guess who, the Impala taxi drivers-- over whether the AT shuttle would ever come, I was determined not to be too worried about possible glitches, but... Well, the shuttle arrived just fine. And the flight occurred just fine (in a South African-liveried plane). So here I am. Plus, it's kind of nice to be able to catch my breath here before plunging into Mozambique, which is another whole part of my project; another, entirely different story to get myself immersed in; and another topic that really, really fascinates me. So Jambo, tonight, from the House of Peace: Dar es-Salaam. Can't tell you much about it yet except that it looks like I'm in the middle of a very big African city.

RICHARD PERLE, VIEWED FROM AFRICA: Sitting around waiting in the the ICTR press office earlier this week, I pisked up a copy of The East African. UN Public Affairs Officer Straton Musonera, who hails from Rwanda, saw what I was looking at. "Did you see that?" he asked, outraged. It was a syndicated article by Richard Perle titled something like, "The UN has no place in the New World Order." Well yes, I had scanned through the piece, and had been disgusted by some of the Prince of Darkness's more aggressive arguments against the UN. "Richard Perle!" I said. "What can you expect?" "You know him?" Straton asked. "So who is he?" I pointed to the tagline at the bottom of the piece. "Look, it says here: 'a member of the Pentagon's defense Policy Board.' Well, of course till a couple of weeks ago he was the Chairman of the DPB. But he's still very influential." "You mean, he's actually an official? I thought he was just some journalist. My God!" Oh yes, Straton. And he's not just some low-ranking paper-pusher, either. He is part of the small group of policy advisors who are driving the administration's present policies.... Honestly, how can we, as Americans, defend having such a malevolent figure as Perle enjoy such influence over our government's policy? Okay, okay, I know I should probably describe him as "misguided" rather than "malevolent"... But still, my general point stands. Note in this regard, too, that if any group of people should feel abandoned or betrayed by the UN, it should be survivors of the Rwandan genocide, like Straton and his friends. Their "case" against the UN has even in recent weeks been vociferously articulated by several high-ranking members of the US administration. But even though the Rwandan genocide survivors have a huge and quite understandable criticism to make regarding the UN's failure to stop the genocide in 1994, still, most of them are quite realistic enough to see that the UN plays a vital role in the world today: one that their nation, like all other small nations, relies on. So Richard Perle's arguments against the UN may play well to that part of the US electorate that has long distrusted the organization, and that feels that the US can get along quite well without it. But I think it would very hard to sell his arguments in most other parts of the world. And that even includes, as far as I can see, in Rwanda.

A NIGHT ON THE TOWN IN ARUSHA: Tonight is my last evening in Arusha. Gabi Gabiro, who works for Hirondelle Press Agency here, a couple of his friends, and I were going out to dinner. I'd been kind of looking forward to this, since I've eaten dinner in my hotel, the Impala, every night since I got here. So Gabi picks a place, we go there straight from a late-ish evening working at the ICTR-- and as restaurants go, this place was a huge disappointment. Food very, very late and individual dishes ranging from the passable to the atrocious. (I don't think I'm dissing Gabi to mention this, since we all mentioned it and commented on it at length over the dinner itself.) It made me wish I'd invited them all here. I've now sampled three of the Impala's four restaurants-- the Chinese, the Italian, and the Indian. And the Indian food here is excellent! Last night I had a chicken and spinach curry that had a lot of ginger in it-- and I ordered it on what they call Kashmiri rice. They always bring pappadums and an array of chutneys "on the house" at the beginning. Also a small salad. And after the curry, I had a marsala tea. Fabulous. Oh dear, makes me sad just to think I could have had that again, tonight. Still, the conversation we had tonight was fun and relaxing and made the outing worthwhile. Another good feature of Impala food is the home-baked breads they serve at breakfast. What with breads, curries, and no running, maybe it's time I leave town before I put on lots of weight. Of course, at dinner tonight, Gabi and his friends all laughed when I said I was leaving on Air Tanzania tomorrow, since apparently AT got taken over not long ago by South African Airways, and SA companies seem generally renowned around here for aggressive asset-stripping.

EDITORIAL NOTE: I've been filing recently from Arusha, Tanzania. There follow some fairly lengthy posts. To read about my "cultural tourism" experience in a Masai village, just scroll down to the very next post.. If you want to read my thoughts about last week's "fall" of Baghdad, click here. To read my detailed description of 'AN INTERNATIONAL COURTROOM IN AFRICA', click here. I'm planning to post a lot of material as my travels continue for the month ahead. Many of the posts will be lengthy. Some might not seem as riveting to you as they are to me. Some may still be on war-in-Iraq issues. But I should imagine that an increasing number will be on what I'm discovering on my 5-week research trip in Africa. (For more details on the project of which this trip is a part, click here.) Hey, I might even post on something completely different! I am not yet certain whether I can keep the JWN Index up-to-date while I'm traveling. But bear with me. I'll try to find ways to make useful internal links, like the ones above. And I'll also work on having the Index be up-to-date and helpful. Jambo from Tanzania!

VISITING WITH THE MASAI: Since I'm here in Arusha alone, I was looking for a good day-hike I could sign up with for yesterday, Sunday. Luckily, in the Tanzania Tourism Board office in town I found something much better: a "cultural tourism program" in the nearby Masai (Wa-arusha) village of Ilkiding'a.. What's more, on the brochure it said there was an option to walk to the starting point from the city. So I signed up. The TTB person said my guide would come and pick me up from the hotel. I was waiting to see if someone in full-scale red-and-blue Masai robes--perhaps with the elaborately braided and decorated hair that I had seen on several Masai men around town-- would walk into the hotel lobby. But no. Jeremiah, when he came, was wearing jeans, tee-shirt, and sneakers. The main thing that stood out about him was his loping, loose-limbed walk. I should have realised: these people really know how to walk. They do it, after all, nearly all the time: up and down the foothills of Mount Meru where their villages lie, and where wheeled vehicles only rarely penetrate. So Jeremiah and I set off at a brisk clip from the hotel, through some peri-urban areas around Arusha. Then, from the main Nairobi-Moshi highway, we took what looked like an insignificant back alley which took us to the main track leading up to the group of villages of which Ilkiding'a is a part. Nearly all the other traffic on this precipitously rutted track was pedestrians. Sometimes a bicycle would come by, or we would see a car painstakingly navigating a dusty way between the potholes. But a LOT of people were walking to and fro. It being Sunday, many of them were dressed in some form of best clothing, carrying well-worn Bibles as they made their way to or from church. Three or four times, as we walked along, we passed tiny churches that seemed uplifted by the multi-part singing that came forth from within. Jeremiah seemed to know a lot of people. I was really glad he was with me. If people shouted over some comment about the "muzungU" (that was me, the only white woman anywhere in sight), he would goodnaturedly shout back something about "m'africa" (an African person). And to the many calls of "how are you?" or "good morning?" that came-- mainly from small children-- he would often take turns with me in shouting back an appropriate English-language response. As we loped along, I had also been trying to get him to teach me some words in his mother-tongue(which is wa-arusha, not Swahili; English is his third language.) However, I proved myself a truly really lousy learner. My ear was definitely NOT in tune. He taught me two ways to say "How are you?" in wa-arusha, and told me that they were gendered. But whether gendered according to the speaker or the addressee I couldn't entirely fathom. So when someone said "takweniya" ("How are you?") to me, I was generally supposed to say "Ee-ko" back to them. But I often couldn't even hear when they "takweniya", along with everything else they might be saying. So then Jeremiah had to prompt me on the "ee-ko" bit, which always caused great merriment all round. Two of the people who seemed to get the most laughter out of this performance were two fully regalia-ed Masai men who walked a little but of the way up to Ilkiding'a with us. The track took us slowly up above the town and through a couple of villages. The terrain here was all intensely cultivated. Coffee bushes I saw for the first time ever. There were maize fields, cabbage fields, beans, tomatoes and other crops. Generally, though, the track was shielded (and shaded) with high hedges of woven thorns, and many different kinds of trees. At a certain point, Jeremiah announced that we had crossed into his village. It would now be possible-- after asking permission each time-- to take photos. "People worried about camera," J. had explained earlier. But from here on, people had been exposed to the "cultural tourism program". Not only had their worries about cameras been somewhat allayed. But also, as it would turn out later, the parents of all the kids in Ilkiding'a were on alert to teach the kids not to harrass the muzungi. (Given the way whitefolks have, in the not-too-distant past, treated the indigenous people of this part of the world, I would say a certain amount of residual resentment would be more than understandable. That was why I was really happy that the CTP allowed me to have this lightly-mediated experience with some Wa-arusha in their own environment.) There was still a bit more walking till we reached the starting point, however. Ilkiding'a is not a compact village. Far from it. The people of the village live in a number of hamlets scattered over the foothills here: In each, there are from around six to more than 20 boma's, with a boma being a fenced household compound belonging usually to a man, and housing however many wives he has, and their children. Jeremiah, who is 29, told me that his late father had had, I think, six wives. He himself has only one. The main form of shelter within the boma is a sturdy round hut with a heavy thatch of straw. The hut, around 20 feet in diameter, is built from thick wood staves planted close together in the ground, and plastered with a pink-brown mud plaster. Each wife has her own hut for herself, her children and animals. There are separate, smaller huts for cooking. We walked quickly past Jeremiah's boma. His wife wasn't there, but his 5-year-old daughter Lucy waved from the door. Jeremiah's two cows lowed at us from behind the hut. They are a legacy from the life-plan he had had a lot earlier, of sticking with the traditional Masai men's heavy focus on livestock-raising. He had followed that life-plan until he was about 15. But then his dad died, and at that point an elder brother who had been put into a school by an uncle intervened, and put Jeremiah himself into a school. So he started doing book-learning only at that point. And he never thereafter pursued the traditional Masai men's (and women's) forms of personal beautification such as splitting the ear-lobes and letting the lower loop dangle down to hold heavy pieces of beaded finery; or various forms of scarification on the face and arms that I saw; or putting the long, intricate braids and metal decorations into their hair... He said he'd tried to put piercings through the top-back of his ear-lobes, such as many Masai people have. (This allows them to have pretty beaded ear-decorations that dangle down the back of their ears quite fetchingly.) But he'd even given up on that after a while. Now, the only apparently non-'western' thing about his looks and grooming was a bead-covered belt such as I've seen several urban Africans wear-- as a sort of 'legacy' thing, I guess. Soon we came to his mother's boma; and shortly after that to the CTP "starting point", which was a little thatched shelter looking out over the next hill. His mother had laid out some beadwork here, and I bought a couple of items. Then, after about 3 minutes sitting down, we started the "real" program.... For the next four hours we walked practically nonstop up and down hills that seemed to get steepr each time. Mainly, we were walking along narrow paths that cut across beautifully cultivated fields-- of cabbage, maize, beans, or tomatoes-- or where the land was steeper, across lush green pastures. All the cultivating that I saw being done-- and this was tough, back-breaking work-- was being done by women and girls. With their checkered Masai cloths knotted over one shoulder and tied around their waists, they would hoist those hoes over their shoulders and over and over again-- thwack, thwack, thwack-- and tilll that dark-covered, well-irrigated soil. The herding was being done by young boys. I have to say I didn't see any adult men actually DOING any work unless you count Jeremiah's guiding (which can't have been easy for him), or the handful of men we saw on the track who were leading cows to or from the market. Well, there were men selling in the market, too. I'll come to that later. One of the main things I was looking forward to on the tour was the promised meeting with the traditional healer. I'm actually very interested in learning about all non-western views on the question of violence. So I had imagined myself having a wonderfully revealing discussion on the cosmology and ontology of violence with a wise Masai elder... until it slowly dawned on me that what with Jeremiah's very limited English and my far, far more limited ability to communicate in either wa-arusha or Swahili, this conversation would probably have many of the same bizarre qualities as the (twice-interpreted) discussion on the same topic that I'd attempted with a Mozambican traditional healer, in Maputo, two years ago. Anyway, once we had climbed the enormous hill to the boma of the Ilkiding'a traditional healer, he was out. Darn it. I should note that I found the visit to the "traditional" knife-maker a little disappointing, too. Masai men like to walk around with a specifically-shaped kind of knife, carried in a particular kind of pink-stained scabbard, hanging form their belts. The brochure promised a visit to the knifemaker. Turns out the knifemaker in question buys regular-style, Chinese-made agricultural machetes (pangas) from someplace, and then essentially cuts them down to the dimensions favored by the Masai; then he makes the scabbard. Somehow it didn't seem like the "timeless handicraft" passed down from "many generations" that I had been expecting. (I guess that's the problem with my naive, essentialist view of culture. Oh well.) But those disappointments were tiny, compared with the exhilaration-- I can only call it that-- of having this great new hiking-plus-cultural adventure with my new friend, Jeremiah. It really did feel great to be able to walk with him around his home environs, and to have him pay such close attention to trying to help me understand everything I saw. The inside of the huts that I visited, and how the space there is used. The "maize stores" high up in the trees. (Someone climbs the tree and sits on a likely branch. A colleague on the ground tosses up each corn-cob with its streamer-like wrapping; and then the streamers are somehow tied over the branch, one and then the next, till hundreds of corn-cobs are tied up there in a huge clump, secure from any animal predators.... And we're talking sometimes maybe 40 or more feet high.) So many things to learn about! Along the way, Jeremiah and I decide that, since we have no traditional healer visit, we'll have time to go to the "Masai market" late in the afternoon. He promises that it'll be interesting. But it seems he's also fairly eager to go there himself. At one point, as the afternoon hours wear on, we walk along an extremely steep-sided ravine to see the waterfall at the end of it. The streams and rivers here generally gush plentifully down from deep inside Mount Meru. Jeremiah does explain one ritual the traditional helaer leads, at a specific tree, to beg the power-that-be for rain in times of drought. As he explains, it involves four calabashes being reverently placed by the tree, each containing various things; and then the name of Jesus being invoked. "Jesus?" I ask. "What is his role in all this?" "Well, they just say 'Jesus'," Jeremiah explains. "They don't say the word Christ. That would not be right." But that explanation came later. We were there, at the bottom of the ravine. It was nearly 2 p.m. We'd been walking nearly nonstop for five-and-a-half hours. "Up here," said Jeremiah. And he led me just about vertically up the mud-covered, many-hundred-feet-high bank of the ravine. I knew if I missed my footing even once, I would slip back straight to the bottom. Amazingly-- I don't know how-- I made it. "We reach!" Jeremiah told me exultantly as we emerged into the pasture above. And indeed we had: we'd reached exactly back to the "starting point." "You hungry," he said matter-of-factly. And yes, by then it was a burningly evident matter of fact. His mother brought four covered pots of food and I wolfed down a huge plateful. There was a traditional dish (I think) of beans and maize. There were rice, potatoes boiled in a tasty broth, and some cooked greens. I was beyond ethnography and failed to ask the name of a single dish. Eating seemed more ways important at that point. We sat, ate, and visited for about an hour. But then it was time to leave if we wanted to catch the market. Jeremiah, his CTP "coordinator" Eliakim, and I had a short discussion of how much it would cost for J & I to get a "transport" to the market, and then back to Arusha. So then J and I walked the 20 minutes or so to the "stand" for the "transport". There were no vehicles there, and seemed little prospect of any coming; so we decided to walk down to the market instead. It was a good experience. (1) It's the way that most of the Masai people get around. So as we walked along those tracks, there was a constant stream of other folks walking to and from the market. (2) It was mainly downhill. Do I need to note the observation that when there were things to be carried, it was nearly always the women and girls who did that? A girl skipping along with a hoe balanced on her head; a Masai woman with a baby tied on her back and a huge woven basket on her head; teenage girls elegantly carrying huge, heavy heads of bananas on their heads... The main time that I saw men and boys helping withe conveying goods was where there was either a bicycle, or some kind of a hand-barow involved. I'm not saying those jobs weren't hard, too. They were. But a lot more sheer weight of stuff was getting carried by women and girls than ended up being pushed along by guys. Jeremiah's estimate that it would take "about 40 minutes more" to get to the market proved remarkably accurate. When we got there it was vast! It spread out all over the creekside settlement of Ngarantoni. It was all open-air; and most of it was quite unshaded. Jeremiah led me through various sections: the used-clothing section; the used-shoe section; along a little back-alley to the fabric section-- many red-and-blue Masai wraps, but many batik-style wraps in other bright hues as well; the basket section; the fresh-produce section; a row of women selling baked goods; the meat section; the beans section... on and on and on. Buyers and sellers tiumbling over each other in the dust. A man improbably trying to drive five cows through the crush in the middle of the market-- one with viciously long horns. People yelling their wares. Friends greeting other. Buyers haggling. Sellers pleading for custom... A dizzying maelstrom. And not another mazungu to be seen anywhere. We emerged breathless on the other side. Jeremiah had said I should NOT take pictures here-- we were no longer in "the program" here. I hadn't bought anything either. I wouldn't have minded looking at the baskets, or some of the baked goods. But there was no leisurely buying and enjoying the atmosphere here: these people, who hold the market here twice a week, were all here strictly for business. My main achievement as we emerged was not to have lost Jeremiah. His was, I think, to have said hi to around three dozen of his friends, and as far as I could figure to have repaid a few of his financial debts along the way. We emerged onto a paved road. Actually, according to my map it looks like the Nairobi Road, just several miles further along it by now. "You want the livestock market?" Jeremiah asked. Another whole market?? "Where?" I asked, weakly. He pointed to a cloud of dust somewhere over near the horizon. "There!" "I think not. Perhaps we go back to my hotel?" Haha! Easier said than done... What I got included in my "extra" of the trip to the market was my first two rides in Tanzanian dalla-dallas -- the ones that took us back to the Impala Hotel. A dalla-dalla, as I was to learn from the inside, is a totally overstuffed Japanese passenger van that is plied at breakneck speed along a fixed route by a team of at least two people: one to drive it, and the other one or two to hang out of the sliding door on the pasenger side and drum up business along the route. In the first of the two dalla-dallas that we rode, J and I ended up scrunched backwards onto a four-inch bench placed in right behind the front seat. (That one lost all power for a worrying ten minutes too, somewhere along the road, until on about the eighth attempt it got pushed back into life.) The second dalla-dalla was remarkable for the fact that once the seats had all filled up, the passenger side jockey pushed up a huge section of the roof on double hinges and then proceeded to cram in additional passengers who traveled standing, with their heads and shoulders stuck out the top of the van... So I certainly ended up getting more than I'd bargained for, cultural-experience-wise, with the Ilkiding'a Cultural Tourism Program. I am totally grateful to Jeremiah, his mom, Eliakim, and all the other people who make such a great set of experiences available to a total stranger who happen to walk into the Tanzania Tourism Board office looking for an interesting day-hike. Sure, the Ilkiding'a folks could work out some of those small wrinkles in the program. (I want my traditional healer!!!) But all-in-all it seemed like a fabulous program that helped this ignorant muzungu to see beyond the mere "exoticism" of the Masai people and to initiate a respectful interaction with some actual Masai persons. The TTB actually has a number of different cultural tourism programs that they offer. I have some brochures for this one. But the brochure says you can get more info from www.tourismtanzania.org . Ashinali! Amani!

AN INTERNATIONAL COURTROOM IN AFRICA: The Arusha International Conference Center is a sprawling concatenation of three or four large, 1960s-style white concrete buildings netsled into the northeast side of the city of Arusha. The vegetation here is lush. Splendidly blossomed jacaranda trees, dense palm trees, and lots of other Africa varieties that I'm incapable of naming, form a lush canopy over many of the packed-earth sidewalks around town. Market women in gaily colored wraps stand at the street corners with lush baskets of mangos, pineapples, and tiny sweet bananas. It rained this morning: a swift, dense drencher that swept down from Mount Mero, the massive volcanic mountain, slightly shorter sister of nearby Kilimanjaro, that guards the city to the north. Then, shortly after the drencher, I heard cocks crowing and a distant Muslim call to prayer before I drifted back to sleep. The Conference Center was built to be the headquarters of an attempt at an East African Union that failed. Now, some of its wings house offices for the follow-on Commission for East African Cooperation (between Tanzania, where we are, and Kenya and Uganda which both lie close to Arusha to the north.) Given its pleasant and well placed location, the Arusha Conference Center has also been used to host several significant inter-African peace negotiations over the decades. Most recently, a South-African-brokered peace agreement for Burundi has been negotiated here. In 1993, Arusha was the site of the signing of the famous "Arusha Accord", which aimed at bringing internal peace to Rwanda-- a country that neighbors Tanzania to the east. But that agreement failed, destroyed in the maelstrom of genocidal violence that swept Rwanda in 1994. Later that year, a UN Security Council driven largely by guilt over its failure to prevent or bring an end to the genocide, decided considerably after the event that it would at least establish an international court to try leading perpetrators of the genocide. And it decided to locate the court in-- Arusha. To be precise, in some unused portions of the Arusha International Conference Center. Blue-uniformed UN guards now control one gate into the Conference Center. The first day I was here, I got myself a "Researcher" pass from the court's security division. Today, I swipe it like an old-timer and walk into the dimly cavernous lobby. I poke my head into the untidy-as-usual press center and say hi to Gabi Gabiro, a friend-of-a-friend who's worked here for three years as a correspondent fotr the Hirondelle News Agency. I walk up some concrete stairs to a walkway that takes me across to another building. Waiting at the elevator are other people coming, as I am, to one of the three courtrooms run by the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). But others awaiting the elevator are going up to other floors where the East African Commission or other bodies work. It seems a fairly chaotic situation. I'm headed for the fourth floor, where in ICTR Courtroom 1 three defendants are now in Day 229 (I kid you not-- that's two-twenty-nine!) of what is called the "media trial". These are people accused of having masterminded some of the hate-filled, anti-Tutsi speech that filled, in particular, one radio station and one magazine before and during the genocide, and therefore of having helped to incite the genocide, as well as to have conspired in its organization. (Under the Genocide Convention of 1948, inciting or conspiring with others to commit genocide is as much punishable as actually committing it.) This is a most amazing courtroom. Whoever figured out how to fit a courtroom into this available space took a long, low-ceilinged room and sliced it into half lengthways, with disconcerting result that the "public gallery" runs nearly right along the length of the space, with three very long rows of chairs facing toward the "action". And the "action" itself is similarly strung out along the other side of the room, behind bullet-proof glass-- about 50 or more feet from left to right as I peer in. From our side of the glass, the different, and visually segmented portions of the courtroom look like exhibits in an indoor zoo. Tucked in at the extreme left-hand end in there we have the three defendants, three men in shirtsleeves or somber western-style garb sitting generally bored behind their desk in the "back" of this side of the courtroom, with UN guards on each side of them. (The public, I note, can barely see the defendants at all; and I'm not sure whether the judges can see them either. I believe, along with the British philosopher of punishment Tony Duff, that a criminal court proceeding should centrally be an authoritative communication between the Bench--on behalf of society-- and the defendant. Hard to see how that can happen here.) In front of the defendants (reading this scene from left to right) are two rows of desks for their attorneys-- six or eight places in all. All those people are facing to the right (as I look at it.) Then, we come to the two rows of people who are facing "forward", that is, toward the public gallery. Furthest from us, and raised maybe eight inches higher than the rest of the courtroom, is, in central position, the Bench. Three judges-- a Norwegian man, a South-African Indian woman (the Presiding Judge here, and also President of the entire ICTR venture), and a Sri Lankan man. All are resplendent in the red-satin-faced judges' robes that someone back in 1994 or so designed for the judges in ICTR's more famous sister court, the court for former-Yugoslavia that's located in the Hague. Behind the judges hangs a UN flag. They are flanked by court reporters and clerks. The general decor in the courtroom is Scandinavian/functional: light-colored wood furnishings, white walls, blue chair-seats and carpet. In front of the judges, officers of the court's central administration, the Registry, sit at another row of desks, also facing us. The Registry officials, like all the attorneys for both defense and prosecution, all wear big ballooning black robes elaborately tailored with pin-tucks and little buttons, over which they wear the apparently mandatory French-style white tucked jabots. (Sort of an eight-inch-long white thing that hangs out over the robe at the throat, and is secured--sometimes haphazardly-- with velcro at the back of the neck. This whole get-up is another cultural import from the Hague.) One of the defense lawyers, the British QC Diana Ellis, wears atop her dark-brown hair the small-size powdered wig that is a mark of her exalted judicial status back home. Talk about rituals and regalia! And then, between the Registry officials and us is the present witness. With her back to us. We actually look at the Bench "over the witness's shoulder", so to speak. Many of the witnesses who come here are "protected", which means that their true identity is a closely guarded secret of the court. They are referred to in public only by randomly assigned letters; and inside the courtroom their identity is hidden from the public gallery by heavy curtains which can be drawn around the witness's desk. Today's witness, however, is a defense witness-- an interesting woman who is herself a defendant in the Rwandan court system where since she's accused of the highest category of genocide-related crimes she almost certainly faces the prospect of a death penalty. Death penalties are not allowed here, in this genteel, European-style court. Her name is Valerie Bemeriki. She was, Gabi tells me, a "real celebrity" in Rwanda during the genocide era, when she was a much-listened-to announcer on Radio/Tele Libre des Milles Collines (RTLM, the main hate radio). Now, she appears like a dumpy, slightly physically disabled older woman whose bright-colored clothing and generally defiant mien cannot make up for the fact that she looks scared and frequently slightly confused. (I can tell you what her facial expressions convey because her face, like those of all others who speak in the court-- but notably NOT those of the defendants unless they're speaking-- is shown to us on a closed-circuit video system whose operation is, I imagine, supposed to compensate for the lack of direct lines-of-sight inside the courtroom. Each of the main participants in the drama in front of us has a 15- or 17-inch video screen in front of her or him. Though these screens are fairly thin, still, they contribute along with many other factors, to blocking our ability to watch the actions and interactions of the participants directly. We in the public gallery have three high screens placed along gallery that show us the simultaneous feed. But still, that's no substitute for being able to see for ourselves what's going on, since on the screens we can only see the one view that someone--who?-- has chosen to show us. On occasion, this is a shot of a written document, which means that we don't get to see people's faces at all.) Bemeriki and the chief defense lawyer who had called her, Jean-Marie Biju-Duval from France, are the only two actors today whose main language is French. Actually, to be fair, French is probably Bemeriki's second language, with Kinyarwanda being her first. But she has chosen to speak here and to interact with the court in French, though Kinyarwanda would also-- like English-- have been a option in this trilingual court. I should have mentioned earlier that everything that goes on inside this courtroom is pursued with and through simultaneous interpretation. So in addition to wearing funny European-style robes, all the participants (including us, the "representatives" of the public!) also wear headsets for the interpretation. We get a fairly intimate direct view of the back of the witness's legs swinging down from her chair . Over to the left of her is a row of desks that now stand empty. But on a shelf above them are placed a number of large box files whose main effect is further to block our ability to see anything. Our lines of sight are, in general, abysmal. The floor level of our gallery is about six inches lower than the floor of the courtroom. Bunched around Witness Bemeriki are the drawn-back curtains that-- for a "protected" witness-- would have blocked her identity from our view. Now, hanging there, all they do is further obstruct our view. And to the right of the witness's desk is a huge cart laden with two layers of additional bulky and quite opaque box-files and--to add insult to injury for the long-suffering "public"-- the back of a water cooler that, inside the "active" part of the courtroom, has been pushed up against the glass to yet further obstruct our view. It's as though the designers and users of this courtroom basically have contempt for the "public" that comes to view its proceedings. As though they didn't care much at all about justice "being seen to be done" here... (Sorry about that. It was the carelessly positioned water-cooler that really broke the camel's back on this issue for me.) And, moving right along further to the right, we have the two rows of the prosecuting attorneys' desks, now facing inward to the left. Up to bat today from one of these desks is Simone Monasebian, a US lawyer who seems to be practicing here all the tricks of an aggressive district attorney in some jurisdiction in the US. She is cross-examining Witness Bemeriki, and thus is allowed to ask leading questions. She's a physically impressive woman whose shoulder-length dark hair straggles out untidily from under her headset. "Isn't it true that... " she presses the witnesses. Or she'll make a lengthy statement and then pounce forward at the end with a defiant "What say you, Mme. Bemeriki?" Of course, the fact that all these theatrics have to go through interpretation means that there is always a slight time-lag between question and answer. In addition, several times throughout the morning the interpreter's weary voice comes onto everyone's headsets pleading with Monasebian to please slow down. The whole interaction has a slightly spaced-out, unreal, one might even say doped-up quality. The distance between the two banks of attorneys must be about 30 or 40 feet. When a defesne lawyer stands up to challenge something the prosecutor is saying, the two of them face each across this distance (rather than both of them facing the judge), and the poor judges have to swing their heads from side to side like a person watching tennis. I guess I'll just finish the physical description here by recording the presence, furthest to the right, and also behind glass, of the three interpreters' booths. We cannot see their faces directly. Every so often, when the video feed gives us a full-face shot of Monasebian strutting her New-York-courtroom stuff ("Enough already!" she says with theatrically produced exasperation at one point), we can see the blurred face of the interpreter in the booth behind her. Oh, and another of the strange effects of the whole interpretation thing-- in addition to the time lag -- is that when Bemeriki is interpreted into English for the Anglophones among us, the voice that does this is a definitely gruff male voice. As I sit here, I switch my headset between the French-language and the English-language feeds. In addition to what's coming in on everyone's headsets, there is also a simple loudspeaker in our gallery--as presumably inside the accoustically-challenged courtroom itself-- that gives the verbatim version of what's being said, whether it's in English, French, or-- presumably--Kinyarwanda. So it's quite possible to listen with one ear to what's being said in, say, English, on the loudspeaker, and also to what the interpreter is saying, in French, on the headset. Or vice versa. I can tell you that though the interpreters seem to be doing a generally good job--and under grueling, day-after-day circumstances!--the interpretation is still far from perfect. An oral interpretation is NOT a word-for-word translation. I know that. But it is supposed to be a faithful interpretation of what is heard. And what I heard during the four or more hours I was in the courtroom so far was that the interpretation on several occasions seemed to present an utterance of very different meaning--sometimes, almost directly contradictory meaning-- to that of the original. This seemed to be particularly the case with the extremely long, convoluted, and rapidly-spoken questions being asked by Monasebian, which the English-to-French interpreter frequently seemed to have enormous--and quite understandable-- difficulty rendering for the witness. Small wonder that the witness so often responded to these questions with blank looks of confusion. On numerous occasions, the increasingly frustrated Chief Judge, Navanethem Pillay, would intervene and re-ask the witness her own version of an extremely lengthy, convoluted Monasebian question. And on those occasions, the witness generally very quickly gave a simple and direct answer.... Well, I don't have time, here, to go any further with my critique of the whole mis-en-scene of ICTR Courtroom Number 1. I note that I have only so far seen a few hours of what is an extremely long-running production. This trial of three accused inciters and organizers of the genocide opened here in Arusha in October 2000. It might be worth trying to figure out how much this trial alone has cost, so far-- these attorneys aren't cheap, I can tell you, and neither is the rest of this entire complex court system. So far, ICTR's nine judges have pronounced judgments on eleven accused men (one acquittal and ten convictions). The amount of money the UN and other, supplementary donors have spent on establishing and then running this court over the past eight years clearly exceeds a billion dollars, most likely by some hundreds of millions of bucks. As to whether the effort has been worth it-- that's what I'm still here to find out. Meantime, tomorrow, Sunday, I'm going to take me a hike to some Masai (Wa-arusha) villages up the slopes of Mount Meru, and get myself more thoroughly back to Africa.

THOUGHTS ON THE FALL OF BAGHDAD: The war is not yet finished. Securing the peace has still even to begin. I think we can attribute the tragic mayhem we presently see in Baghdad and the other Iraqi cities to two main factors: (1) The legacy of 30-plus years of Baathist authoritarianism, that resulted in the total repression of Iraqi civil society and a serious, longterm degradation of public and even personal morals throughout the country. In a place where children are routinely encouraged by the regime to spy on and report on any suspect political tendencies amongst their teachers, parents, and neighbors-- and this has been the case there for nearly two generations now-- basic social trust, and the ability to sustain it, are the real casualties; and (2) Bombs Away Don Rumsfeld's brilliant "strategy" of moving extremely fast to take out the power-center of the regime, with little thought given to how to consolidate public safety in the rear of the advancing forces. With regard to the second of these factors, there is a clear and evident contrast with, for example, the situation during the advance of the (Western) Allied armies during WW2. My father, James Cobban, was a Major in British Military Intelligence during that war. In June 1944, he crossed into Normandy a few days after D-Day. He and a colleague then undertook a detailed evaluation of the effectiveness of the "beach organization" that their unit had been planning, for the British sector of the Normandy beach, throughout the previous months. Their clear thought was that Allied forces continuing to island-hop in the Pacific toward the heart of Japan could benefit from this evaluation. But then, he and his British colleagues, and the Americans with whom they were then--as now--working so closely, immediately turned their attention forward: to how to rule post-victory Germany. Governance of France and Belgium, where the Allied front-line was advancing slowly eastward throughout the rest of 1944, were, I think, left mainly to their own respective national anti-Nazi organizations to plan for. But clearly, ruling post-Nazi Germany would be a task for the major Allied forces. And luckily-- as it turned out-- they had time to make some fairly solid plans. The approach the US and Britain adopted, which was informed by the visionary wisdom of US Secretary of War Henry Stimson, was basically that of rehabilitating German society on a tolerant, democratic basis. (It stood in stark contrast to the strongly punitive approach the Allies had tried at the end of WW1, which, as many of them understood, had later helped to incubate Hitlerism.) And the Americans committed themselves to providing the long-term investment of men and finances needed to bring that project to fruition. Thank God they did--in West Germany, and in post-victory Japan. On Europe's eastern front, things were far more chaotic. As the Russians advanced westward, racing to get to Berlin before the Americans, they left in their wake vast areas of absolutely untamed chaos. Plus, the Russians themselves had suffered so hugely during earlier stages of the war-- with some ten million Russians killed during the Nazis' earlier advance into Russia-- that they were little inclined to "tame" any of the forces of anti-German vengefulness that were loosed in their wake... It is worth remembering that in the months after the Russian advance, some eight million ethnic Germans were summarily ethnically cleansed from Eastern Europe. (That was the number of the ethnic-German refugees who survived that violent upheaval and made it, somehow, to the relative safety of the US-British zone. One can surmise that further hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans-- perhaps millions of them-- never made it that far but were slaughtered along the way. It was an ugly, vengeful process. Yes, those families had lived a life of some privilege in Eastern Europe during the years of the Nazi occupation there. But no, they did not deserve to be driven out of their homes like cattle and summarily stripped of all their possessions along the way.) Now, who knows what is going to happen in Iraq? The fact of the present mayhem behind US-UK lines cannot be wished away, however much Bombs-Away Don desires to do so. It will have lasting as well as immediate political consequences. Based on my experience of having lived in Lebanon during the first six years of the civil war there, I would say that whoever inside Iraq can manage to sustain the kinds of effective social organizations that are capable of providing public order there will de-facto end up in control of those areas where they are able to do this. People cannot live without personal safety, and this requires some form--whatever form it may be!-- of public order. The Americans are not so far providing it. They seem to have made little provision for doing so. ("Eeeegh! Nation-building! Not for us!") And the Americans' non-reponsiveness to the urgent and urgently-expressed need of Iraqis for public order will certainly not go un-noticed. And that includes Bombs-Away Don's public attitude of condoning--almost celebrating!--the looters at their work. In the north-- and I mean that term in a fairly expansive sense-- the Kurdish forces look poised, perhaps, to provide public order. But if they do so, we cannot tell yet what the reaction of the Turks and other neighboring powers will be. And it's not even certain that inter-Kurdish rivalries may not break out again. The same rivalries that crippled the Kurdish areas 1991-96... So, still some big uncertainties there. In the rest of the country, I would place a strong bet on some of the Shi-ite religious organizations being well-placed to provide the public order that the people need. Under Saddam, the Shi-ite religious hierarchy was subject to all the same kinds of repression and control as, say, the Russian orthodox church under Stalin. But still, the outline of Shi-ite religious hierarchies remained. So has some form of strong Shi-ite self-identification of the 60-plus-percent of Iraqis who are Shi-ites. Plus, they have exile-based organizations just across the border in Iran, and an Iranian government that will be very supportive of them, even if in an extremely manipulative way. I saw on CNN Friday that a Shi-ite cleric filmed in Baghdad gave a sermon that seemed to echo very closely some recent statements made by Iranian President Khamanei. To the effect that, while they were glad that Saddam had been toppled, still they knew the US forces had only come in on a pretext of searching for weapons of mass destruction, but that their real motives remained suspect and their plans should be resisted.... So my conclusion is that because the peace in Iraq is still far from being won-- or even, yet, pursued-- by the dominant US part of the US-UK coalition, the war itself is still far from being over. There will be huge challenges, alignments, and realignments of different locally based powers ahead; and many of these shifts of power may be accompanied by further recourse to violence. ( The Iraqi exile politicans are like a froth that dances on the top of this beer. They may have an impact-- but only insasmuch as they have or quickly find a real base among the locally-rooted forces.) We in the global anti-war movement need, I think, to keep our focus clear. We can quickly rejoice that Saddam is no longer in power. But in a real sense, now, Saddam is not the issue. (I can even unite with Bombs-Away Don on that.) The issue is the wellbeing of and longterm prospects for Iraq's 24 million people. How on earth can they be saved from falling into chronic, extremely atrocious and destabilizing, Lebanon-like disorder?? It is clear to me that the further use of aggressive violence is not going to bring this about. As we have already seen, the massive violence applied to Iraq by the US-UK forces has already brought forth torrents of follow-on violence from within that deeply-scarred society. Our emphasis has to be on continuing to urge everyone involved to use the many nonviolent means that remain in order to resolve the remaining issues of serious disagreement. Thank God we still have the UN! For all its flaws, and for all the battering it took at the hands of US arrogance last month, it is still there as an institution that we or any of the parties involved inside Iraq can call on to help to negotiate an exit out of the present, extremely anti-humane state of chaos inside Iraq. People living, like Bombs-Away Don Rumsfeld, in tidy, secure western countries where by and large the maintenance of public order is not even an issue really do not, in my humble opinion, understand how central that one, socially-generated "commodity" is to the wellbeing of actual humans. Can the presence of the US forces inside Iraq contribute to the provision of public order? Certainly, it is their responsibility to do so, under the 4th Geneva Convention. (And the fact that, in their "race" toward Baghdad, they apparently failed to make any effective plans at all to secure public order in the areas behind their lines could possibly even be described as a "grave breach" of Geneva-4; that is, a war crime.) By the same token, if they cannot provide public order then they should just get out of the country, rather than staying, possibly compounding the problem of insecurity by their presence, and by their continuing presence preventing anyone else from doing the job. Can we see a democratic, tolerant, and self-governing Iraq emerge from all this? No, this goal still, sadly, sadly, seems far away. I guess we need to continue to hope, pray, and work hard for it to come about. But the central message remains: Violence still cannot solve problems successfully, in Iraq or anywhere else.

INSIDE SOUTHERN IRAQ: Ghanim Alnajjar is a Kuwaiti professor, long-time human-rights activist, and indeed the UN Secretary-General's Special representative for Human Rights in Somalia and Somaliland. He is also an old friend of mine with whom I was recently put back in touch by Yvette, author of the 'Jaded in Africa' blog (see link to it, at right.) Ghanim has a particular perspective on Iraq, and on the rights situation there. In the waning days of the 1991 Gulf War, he was one of the thousands of Kuwaitis who were taken captive, as civilian hostages, by the Iraqis. He was one of the lucky ones who made it out alive-- and he has always been very active on behalf of those who so far have not managed to do so. (And may never do?) Earlier today, Thursday, Ghanim penned the following account of his recent humanitarian mission into South Iraq, which gives a great and sobering snapshot of the situation there. He's given me permission to run it in JWN: I have just been back from a humanitarian mission from the southern part of Iraq. There are few points which need to raised in this regard. Being not a journalist --with due respect-- but someone who knows this area of the world very well, having many individuals or whole families as friends, I had a chance to have in depth conversations with tens of individuals from different backgrounds, some of them I knew before and the majority I did not know. Some of these quick thoughts are as follows: 1)The resistance: There was no resistance as such. If there was serious resistance, the allied forces would have faced serious difficulty. Most of the people just stood back and watched, waiting for the conclusion of the conflict. 2)Why did the army fail: Most of the enlisted army did not think of the war as their fight, some said to me, many of them are extremely patriotic, it was Saddam's fight. "we are tired of Saddam's fights". Those professional soldiers and officers said they simply changed their clothes and deserted. 3)Why they did not rise up: the memory of the 1991 was present in their mind. Even with the apparent collapse of authority of Saddam's, they just could not trust the US anymore. They needed to see a proof that he left altogether to beleive it. Many people are happy but they did not feel this is the right time for celeberation. They rose up before and were cheated. The US struck a deal with Saddam, and they were the victims after they beleived George Bush sr in 1991. I was joking with three Iraqi doctors in a hospital, telling them some new Kuwaiti jokes about "God may save him" referring to Saddam, they laughed and told me that they have more jokes about him more than I can take. When I asked them to tell me some, they smiled and said, not now, honestly we are not sure. Tens of similar incidents proved the point of fear which played the major role in cooling any potential uprising. 4)Why they did not leave: why there were no refugees, was the reason coercion? No, it was a widespread belief that this war will be over sooner than the world could believe, provided that the allies were serious, not like the 1991 case. This was a mistake in analysis. 5)How about the US?: what is expected towards the US, is it appreciation, suspicion, love , hate,? There is a mixture of suspicion and a-wait-and-see attitude. The general tendency is suspicion more than any other consideration, thanks to the US ill advised behaviour in 1991. There is hope everywhere needing to be warmed up. The current living conditions play some part in causing this attitude. 6)How about the future Iraqi government: It should be noted here that the grave mistake would be to appoint any one of the Iraqi exiles opposition figures for the immediate administration. There will be a negative reaction to such an appointment. I was glad to hear recently that the tendency is going in this direction in the south. I am glad to hear also that a CIA report said something on those lines, finally , the CIA got it right. There are other points but these are some quick ones which I wanted to share... The only sad part in this regard are the civilian casualties, which is partially why I hate wars no matter how politically justified it is.

CSM COLUMN OUT TODAY: I have a column in the Christian Science Monitor today. I wrote it last weekend. It's titled, "Postwar shock and awe in the global economy". I think you can find it here. posted by helena at 4/10/2003 11:06:00 AM | link

GALA DAY FOR THE RESEARCH PROJECT: I've been working on this research project, that looks at the effectiveness, as viewed 8 - 10 years later, of the widely varying policies that each of Rwanda, S. Africa, and Mozambique dopted in the early-to-mid 1990s, for nearly 30 months now. Today was truly a gala day for my enquiry. I had substantial amounts of time with three people key to understanding the Rwanda portion of the puzzle. The first of these was Alison Des Forges, an American researcher who is truly a world-class expert on Rwanda-- as well as a person who's been called as 'expert witness' in a number of trials before the ICTR. I approached her in the public gallery of Courtroom 1 at the end of the morning's proceedings, and she immediately agreed to go have lunch with me. I've been playing an international game of telephone tag w/ Alison for two years or more now! Last year, we had an interaction in print, after she and Ken Roth, the Exec. Director of Human Rights Watch, wrote a fairly sharp criticism of the piece I had in Boston Review about post-genocide policies in Rwanda. (You can access that article through one of the links on the right of this weblog.) Anyway, we had a really good discussion. I went back into the courtroom, and soon enough one of my very, very helpful contacts at the court came in to say that my application to interview Carla del Ponte had just turned up trumps. Carla, as you may know, is the Swiss legal eagle who's the Chief prosecutor for both UICTR and its companion court for former-Yugoslavia, ICTY. I told her when I met her, at four this afternoon, that I last saw her in June 2001-- from distance-- when I was at ICTY the very day that she got custody of Slobodan Milosevic, and she'd given a fairly victorious press conference to celebrate the fact. Then finally, a request that I'd made to speak to one of the defense lawyers came through; so this evening I had a great, one-hour-plus discussion with Diana Ellis, QC, a British barrister who's on the defense team whose performance I'd been watching in Courtroom 1 these past two days. Diana voiced her trenchant criticisms of the ICTR process, which she sees as a clear example of "victor's justice" (and she gave me many examples of bias against the defense teams that seemed to back up this conclusion. She also said that her three-year experience of working on Ferdinand Habimana's defense team at the court had really soured her on the idea she had earlier had, that the ICC might be a great development in international affairs, given that she saw the distinct possibility that many of the problems she had identified at the ICTR would be exported wholesale to the ICC. So, three widely varying points of view there. But all expressed in an extremely articulate and convinced way. Later it'll be time for me to go in detail through the extensive notes that I took, and to make finely-tuned judgments. For now, I'm just acting like a sponge and gathering as much material as I can. Have you noticed something, meanwhile, about the three people I described here? They are all of one gender... Are we talking, then, about a progressive feminization of international affairs? I would wish! But there are some portions of it where women are now coming to form some kind of a critical mass, and I find this really interesting to see (and, I suppose, to be a part of.)

REMEMBERING GENOCIDE: Early April 1994 was the time when that year's terrible genocide in Rwanda was started. It then continued for a further 100 days, in the course of which around a million of the country's seven million people were killed. In a very hands-on way. Every year recently, inside Rwanda, the government has devoted the first week of April to genocide remembrance, and the observation of this solemn commemoration has started to spread a little outside the country. I'm here in Arusha, Tanzania, the city where the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), which was the UN's main (ex post facto) response to the Rwandan genocide. Friends who work at the ICTR note that April 7-- the day when the commemorations inside Rwanda come to a peak-- passed in the Court with no word about it being uttered by the various international judges and lawyers who work busily there, developing the "professional field" of international criminal law with what sometimes seems like scant heed being paid to the actual who were affected by the genocide. But this evening, a local, mainly-Rwandan church had organized a commemorative service-- and the guest/speaker of honor was Adama Dieng, the Registrar of the ICTR, which was a lovely gesture, much appreciated by the other participants. The commemoration turned out, actually, to be mainly a very Pentecostal-style chuservice, with lots of great singing and clapping. I had seen and participated in several such services when I was in Rwanda last year. The evangelical Christians seem to have made hundreds of thousands-- maybe millions-- of serious converts in the country, after the Catholic hierarchy was so compromised by its involvement w/ the genocide. Anyway, many of the evangelical-style modes of worship seem to have a strongly healing, cathartic effect on people whose whole universe was torn apart by the genocide. Inside Rwanda, in many congregations, Tutsis and Hutus worship and work alongside each other in such churches. (And that includes inside the local Quaker "churches", which is what they call them there: Eglises des Amis.) Our commemoration here was held in a cavernously vast, ill-lit barn of a church building. One of the people I was with said that the joyful singing seemed a bit out of place on such an occasion. But I think it was really more the way these people-- many, many of them direct survivors of the genocide-- have chosen to reconstruct some meaning in their lives. There were, anyway, some solemn words from a pastor-- who reassured people that though things may have seemed bleak, "at least God knows what's going on." Also that what had happened, "had exposed the continued workings of evil in the world." The bulk of the day before that, I had spent at the ICTR, watching highly paid international lawyers quibble over tiny sub-details in an extremely complex case. I was reminded, of course, of the comments made by both Rebecca West, at Nuremburg, and by Hannah Arendt, during the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, that such trials dealing with major atrocity can easily end up being extremely legalistic, not to mention just plain boring. Apparently, though, I'd arrived at a "good" day, drama-wise, in the trial of some of the media people involved in whipping up race-hate in Rwanda. On the witness stand was a well-known Rwandan radio announcer called Valerie Beremiki who was appearing as a witness for the defense of an accused radio-company official The wrinkle here being that Valerie herself is on trial inside the Rwandan justice system, where as a top suspect she may well be subject to the death penalty. So the South African judge was every so often at pains to remind the very robust cross-examining lawyer that Valeries had good reason to avoid self-incrimination... Anyway, more on the court later. I haven't seen much of Arusha, though it seems like a great place. I came in through Kilimanjaro International Airport, drove past the mountain to get here, and noted a number of Masai young men riding around on bikes in their beautiful red cloaks, bearing their herding sticks crosswise across the handle-bars...

FROM NAIROBI AIRPORT: I've now been traveling for 40-plus hours, so far seen four airports and a few areas of West London (I guess that was on Monday). Interesting that these places (Dulles, Heathrow, Jo'burg, Nairobi) seem almost totally unaffected by war-related anything. The only notable thing, in Jo'burg, was several passengers who looked Asian were wearing face masks. SARS seemed bigger than what Jim Woolsey described last week "World War IV". I have a few issues of connectivity to work out, regarding the GSM cellphone I bought in London. The phone weighs far, far less than the whole mess of plug adaptors I had to buy to use it, since it has English-style pins... Oh well, joys of technology. The next flight-- to Kilimanjaro-- is on something called Precision Air. It's apparanetly a new operation. The name may express aspiration more than description, but let's see. I'm so glad I remembered there's this little internet place at Nairobi airport. $2 per 15 mins. Better run!

RUSSIAN SITE'S VERSION OF COL. DOWDY REMOVAL: Back on March 25, I wrote about the pair of Russian websites that seem to be being maintained by Russia's GRU military intelligence. Since then, I've intermittently been trying to assess these sites' output. Today, a piece on the English-language version of www.iraqwar.ru writes about yesterday morning's surprise removal/replacement of the commander of the 1st Expeditionary Marine Squadron, Col. Joe Dowdy. No public explanation of this move has yet been provided by the US brass. The Russian site says that Col. Dowdy was, "deposed, '…for utmost hesitation and loss of the initiative during the storm of An-Nasiriya…'. This way the coalition command in Qatar found an excuse for their military faults by that town. The 'guilt' of the colonel was in his refusing to enter the town for almost 3 days and trying to suppress Iraqi resistance with artillery and aviation, trying to avoid losses." The Russians give no source for the portion they put in quotes there. Elsewhere, they frequently cite "intercepted communications" as their source. Last week, reading a piece on one of the GRU sites, I got pretty excited that they seemed to have good knowledge of internal communications not just in the battlefield in Iraq, but also inside the Pentagon. Things they were writing then would appear in the Washington Post two or three days later. Then I thought, Nah, maybe it's not the Pentagon they're bugging. Maybe it's just the internal chitchat among the WP reporters. Back in the 1980s, I used to study the Russian military quite closely. Back then, of course, they were still the Soviets. Their military analysis then was often pretty sophisticated, and it still seems to be so. One of the things they often do on these new websites, this one and this one, is to assess the effectiveness that the US military's tactics, as revealed in Iraq, would have on any operations inside northern Eurasian terrain. By no means a stupid thing to do! And they also seem happy to let readers see-- to some degree-- how smart they are at whatever combination of actual listening and disinformation this is. Not stupid at all. And often, actually, quite interesting and well done. Please send me your comments.

COMMENTS FEATURE ON 'JWN' SOON? Well, I can't tell you how soon, since I'm just about to go of on this complicated trip. (See previous post, below.) But my technical advisor and I are working on specs for a radically upgraded presentation for JWN, as soon as we can manage it. In the meantime, I keep telling myself I could at least put in a little feature at the end of each pst-- either in the template (which I'm a bit wary of fiddling with at this point) or in each separate post, that would give you a handy way at least to email some comments to me. Like this: Please send me your comments.

MENTAL MIGRATION TO AFRICA: I am definitely on my way, switching gear between my obsession with the unfolding Iraq situation, and my upcoming five-week research trip to Africa. Wednesday, I picked up my Mozambique visa in DC. Thursday, I picked up my traveler's checks. Today, I picked up my re-issued ticket. I am definitely ready to rock and roll! Sunday evening will be the time I actually leave, from Dulles airport near DC. Then I'll arrive in Arusha, Tanzania Tuesday evening. Kilimanjaro International Airport, here I come! Because of the way I work, I do nearly all the work of preparing my research trips myself. No-one ever gave me a secretary. But that's okay. I kind of love the nitty-gritty of it all: sending out the emails and faxes; planning the schedule; poring over the well-thumbed Lonely Planet guides to East Africa and Southern Africa; etc etc. And then, there's reading myself into where I want to be with the subject of the research. If you want to know what my project is about, there's a description of it here. That description is a little old at this point-- I do need to FTP my latest version of it over to the site. But you'll get the general drift there. These days, I'm recontextualizing it a bit. I see the project as looking at how effective the different strategies have been, that these different societies chose back in the 1992-94 period, to deal with legacies of grave recent violence-- and therefore, what does it take for societies to escape from cycles of violence? The three cases in question are Rwanda, Mozambique, and South Africa. And yes, I know that the violence that occurred in each case was very specific, very sui generis. But still, I'm comparing the escape-from-violence strategies, not the violence itself. Of the three, I'll confess that right now it's Mozambique that intrigues me the most. Maybe because it's been so little studied. Maybe because it challenges so many of the unquestioned assumptions of the "modern" western view of the world. Yes, yes, contacts who are anthropologists of Mozambique have warned me against essentializing the cultural/cosmological differences between western and Mozambican worldviews, and against "exoticizing" my view of Mozambique. But still... (What's the opposite of "exotic", I wonder? I guess it should be "endotic"... ) Just yesterday, I got hold of and started avidly reading Leslie Swartz's intriguing book, "Culture and mental health; A southern African view." (This morning, I found LS's email address, and sent a message to him pleading for time to talk w/ him while I'm in SA.) Anyway, I wanted to write something here about a really interesting interview a friend from FCNL sent me today, in which Africa Action Exec Director Salih Booker talks about the devasting effect the present USUK war on Iraq is having on people in Africa. Maybe I'll take some excerpts from that interview and discuss them in a subsequent post. Bottom line: "The war in Iraq is sure to have an overwhlemingly negative impact on Africa." But go to that link I put, to see some of the really horrendous details Booker talks about. I have also found it really inspiring, as I've been preparing for this trip, to go and read the "Jaded in Africa" blog that I have a link to in the column to the right. Yvette, who writes that blog, is a most remarkable person: a Filipina who's doing social-development/social-organizing work in Somaliland. She's observant, sensitive, self-aware, funny, informative, and dedicated. And she writes a beautiful blog!! Today, she wrote a post about the Somali concept of "bulshada", which is sort of like a strong concept of "community". She writes that she's found a strong and supportive bulshada with other Filipinos working in the Somaliland capital, Hargeisa. I have a number of great, supportive bulshadas. I have a fabulous family. I have my f/Friends in the Charlottesville Friends Meeting (Quakers), and in our town's lively peace-and-justice community. And I have friends and contacts around the world who provide emotional support as well as intellectual challenges and plenty of humor. And now, thanks to this amazing world of the blogosphere, I have another new friend, whom I've never met but for whom I feel huge empathy: Yvette. Go read her blog! Please send me your comments.

YARD-SIGN UPDATE: At the end of a post last Sunday, I wrote that I was going to put yellow-ribbon bows onto the two peace signs we have in our front yard. I did that, Monday. They looked pretty good, I thought. Wednesday night, the signs got uprooted yet again. These are really pretty and effective signs, that have been designed and sold at cost by the Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice. They have white writing on a blue background. One side says "Stand up for peace". The other says "Say NO to war." CCPJ is already well into selling the second thousand of these signs, and if you drive around our hometown you'll see them on many, many front lawns. Our home has a prime frontage onto a busy crosstown street. Thousands of cars drive past each day, and when the University of Virginia is in session we have hundreds of pedestrians, joggers, and cyclists walk along our sidewalk each day, too. It's a great place to have pro-peace signs. Since I first put peace signs out in mid-January, they have been stolen, broken, defaced, or punched through on at least six occasions. For a while, after CCPJ had sold its first batch of 1,000 and before the second batch came in, I had to replace the stolen or broken signs with handmade ones. (And I can tell you that 'Magnum' brand supposedly permanent markers do NOT keep their hue when subjected to severe snowstorms.) Later, however, I built up a back-up supply of the CCPJ signs in my garage, and would simply replace the signs that got stolen or defaced. For some reason, yesterday morning, when I saw that the signs had been taken away yet again, I felt sick to my stomach, and more violated than I had on any previous occasion. Maybe that was because I'd personalized them with the four hand-made yellow bows. Anyway, I felt quite fed up, and started thinking that maybe having the signs simply stuck into the soil near the sidewalk meant they were just too easy for hostile passers-by to interfere with. (Previously, I'd considered, and quite rejected, the idea of electrifying them somehow.) But maybe, I speculated yesterday, I could suspend them, instead, from some of the tree-branches that hang over the property beside the sidewalk?? So this morning I walked along the sidewalk with the dog to scout out the possibilities. Yes, definitely some very likely looking branches there... But as I walked, I looked down into the little stream that girds our property, some 20 feet below the road -- and there they were! My beloved signs, still decked out with soggy looking ribbons: one in the stream, the other beside it. Both a little scuffed looking... Well, as you can imagine, for now they are firmly back in solid ground, doing their job of quiet peace witness. But I still wonder about the sad people who feel compelled to uproot, seize, and sometimes deface and mangle these signs. What about those values that the US was built on: free speech, and private property? And they would do this even to signs that have yellow bows on them? Yesterday, some pro-war people from around our area staged a counter-demonstration to the antiwar demonstration that CCPJ and its allies have been maintaining every Thursday afternoon for many years, on a busy intersection near the downtown mall. (I was not there at yesterday's antiwar demonstration. But I was there last week, and I noticed at the time that a middle-aged white guy standing across the street seemed to be watching our arrival and arrangements fairly closely... ) Here's how Daily Progress writer Reed Williams described the initial encounter between the two groups yesterday: Antiwar activists arriving for a weekly demonstration outside the federal courthouse on Thursday found that their stretch of sidewalk had been occupied by flag-waving supporters of war in Iraq. If this was not startling enough for the protesters, who are accustomed to gathering more or less unchallenged every Thursday at the Charlottesville intersection, one member of the pro-Bush camp ordered them to leave. “Get out of here,” Robert A. Myer snarled. Then the 71-year-old Fluvanna County resident began to taunt a woman toting a “Say No to War” sign... Well, it turns out I do know the woman in question. Poor her, having to put up with such misbehavior! But I'm quite confident that she handled the "snarling" and the "taunting" calmly and well. I also think, poor Robert A. Myer. He must be a deeply troubled man. Does he have a loved one serving in the forces, and is he sick with worry over that person's fate, I wonder? Or what else might be his problem? Really, we in the antiwar movement have to find good ways to talk to these sad souls. I mean, surely we can find a way to be civil with each other, and to treat each other with respect and empathy, even if we disagree?? Please send me your comments.

PLANNING FOR THE 'AFTERMATH': The military outcome of this war is, at this point in time, completely unpredictable. The currently "best possible" scenario for the US-UK troops could be mean getting into Baghdad within the next 2-3 days; regime collapse there spreads out through the whole country; extension of a measure of US-UK military control over the whole country by the end of April. The "worst possible" scenario would be that sometime between 2004 and 2005 the US decides the still-continuing imbroglio has become so costly that it finally decides to "redeploy offshore" (Reagan's memorable term for the withdrawal from Lebanon, 1984) and has to plead desperately for the United Nations to facilitate its departure... Actually, a short-term appearance of that "best case" does not in itself preclude the subsequent realization of the "worst case." But even in itself, the "best case" scenario as outlined above now looks highly unlikely. What is clear is that what was envisaged -- and actively peddled-- by many in the Washington policy community as a sort of hygienic and rapid shift from an "Iraq dominated by Saddam" situation to an "Iraq rebuilt by America" situation has been neither hygienic nor rapid. Instead, the US-UK forces are mired in the mud, fog, and pestilence of combat. Which is the precise fact that the war-peddlers wanted the rest of the world to forget about all along. Hence, what I always called their strong attempt to "elide" the nasty fact that before the "rebuilding by America" phase could begin, there would still, actually, have to be a war. They made it sound like some wonderful, Iraq-wide urban renewal scheme. Just a few political details to be seen to there-- oh, just the collapse of a national government, nothing major-- and then the good and the great could get on with their intensely visionary, intensely humanitarian task of building a new Iraq. Except that three or four of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse had to be summoned in along the way there. But no need for me to labor this point any more. I wrote a lot about the "elision of war" move before the war was launched. I guess I do want to make one arcane etymological point, though, while we're talking about an "aftermath". This word has no relationship to ordinary math-- arithmetic and geometry and such. Instead, the "math" in there is an Old English term for land that has been mowed. (As "filth" is an area that has been fouled, etc.) So to have an "aftermath", first of all you need to do some "mowing". And mowing is a totally appropriate term to describe what is being inflicted on the people of Iraq right now... Example: the Brits are now jumping up and down saying they need to get into Basra because the people there have no clean water. Well, why do they have no clean water? Is it that they've never had clean water? No. Is it because the city's water-pumping plants-- whose capacity had previously been reduced by 12 years of UN-US-UK-imposed sanctions on vitals parts-- were finally knocked out of business in the first days of this war by a British or American bombardment? Yes: this explanation of what happened is far, far more likely. And throughout the whole country the same pattern has been observed. Because of President Bush's inhuman decision to launch this war, major damage has been caused to many pillars of Iraq's national infrastructure. That is what happens in war. (Which all the eager "urban renewers" in the policy and "humanitarian" communities preferred to forget.) But then, for the protagonists of this war to say that at this stage they need to continue the fighting in order to "save" the Iraqi people from the consequences of the resulting, and quite predictable, humanitarian disaster-- well, this defies all morals and logic. [The other day, my 17-year-old daughter Lorna Quandt said in amazement: "Mom, has the world always been this crazy?" I said, "Well, love, it's true that states often treat other states and their citizens very cynically. So I guess at one level it's always been somewhat like this. But these present claims of 'humanitarianism' really are beyond belief." We agreed that an analogous situation in our neighborhood would be if we set fire to our neighbor's house, and then as the flames rose higher rushed ostentatiously in to "save" her. And that after that, we would just stay on in her house and say that because we had "saved" her life, now we claimed her house as our own... ] I actually set out to write about the still-ongoing wrangle inside the Bush administration over who gets to control post-war Iraq. Even though it may seem hard to see just why anyone would want to get stuck with what likes a mammoth tar-baby of a political challenge there. But still, Washington infighting being what it is, everyone there is fighting for a piece of the piece of the "post-" war action. In fact, they're doing it so hard that few people even look outside Washington and notice that actually, even Tony Blair wants the UN to play a major role in overseeing Iraq's rebuilding. The fighting, as so often, has been between the hawkish Pentagon suits and the State Department. Earlier, agreement had been reached that post-war Iraq would be administered by an all-American body headed by a recently retired General, Jay Garner. But who would work under him? (Garner himself comes across as either tight-lipped or very unsure of himself.) State had earlier rolled out its own plan: to have, under Garner, three very well qualified senior Foreign Service Officers (two females and one African-American) each rule Gertrude Bell-like over a sector of a somewhat federalized Iraq... But then, the Pentagon countered with a petulant insistence that No! It wanted to have its own favored nominees in control of the whole shebang. One name prominently mentioned was that of Jim Woolsey, a former Director of the CIA in the early Clinton years who is also a Board member of the extremely rightwing Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. (Garner also has a lesser link with JINSA: he went on a JINSA-sponsored trip to Israel a few years ago.) In the NYT today, David Sanger has a piece in which he reports that, "On Capitol Hill, however, even the Republican-controlled appropriations committees of both the House and Senate voted today to take control of reconstruction out of the hands of the Pentagon, and give it to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. The committees voted to give the State Department and other agencies authority over the $2.5 billion in post-conflict aid that the Bush administration sought for the Pentagon under an emergency appropriation." So the issue has been resolved for now.... Or has it? Who can tell whether the Pentagon suits might not mount a counter-attack? What about Blair and his continued insistence that the UN has to have a role? And anyway, more fundamentally, who can foresee at this point when it might even be safe to start thinking about starting long-term reconstruction in Iraq, rather than just short-term distribution of emergency rations? One thing does seem clear. Given that all the promises made by the exiled Iraqi pol, the Great Pretender Ahmed Chalabi, to the effect that "his" people inside Iraq would all rise as one to welcome their US-UK "liberators", have been proven disastrously misbegotten, that is one person who most likely will NOT be given any role in "rebuilding" Iraq. Meanwhile, the 60-plus percent of the Iraqi population who are Shi-ites seem simply to be biding their time. It increasingly seems to me that the future of nearly all the non-Kurdish part of the country will lie in their hands, and in no-one else's. In a future post-- to be written, perhaps, as I take my 40-hour, four-leg journey to Arusha, Tanzania in just a few days' time-- I'll say a few things about the time I visited the Iraq's two very holy Shi-ite cities, Najaf and Kerbala, back in 1980.

YELLOW RIBBON SHORTAGE: Yesterday, I wrote that I was going to buy some yellow ribbon and make bows to put on the peace signs in our front yard. So I got to the local craft supplies / "notions" store around 5:30 p.m., and the ribbon department was nearly totally out of yellows. The point of this, you'll remember, was to send a message of support for US troops-- while totally not ignoring the devastation being rained on Iraqi troops and civilians and without diluting at all our family's stand against the war. So all I could find was two spools of very thin (maybe 3 mm.) satin ribbon. I spooled it quickly over the thumb and little finger of my left hand to make multi-looped bows of as much volume as possible. Made four of them. Tied one to each side of each of our yard signs. They looked pretty good as I did them, though when I stepped back they looked a little wimpy. Saturday night, I bumped into my friend "jailbird" Michele at a potluck. (You remember Michele from this post; and this one. She's the person who started the idea of doing an antiwar sit-in in our local Congressman's office on March 20th.) On Saturday she was once again really upset about the war. Her daughter's boyfriend joined the Marines about six months ago. "They lied to him!" she said, again and again, shaking her head in disbelief. "They said he would just be able to learn computers! They said he would never go anywhere near the front line of any war." The young man's recruitment had been a sort of long-drawn-out seduction campaign by the recruiters, who started when he was only 16. ("Only 16! It's an outrage!") Michele and her life-partner had tried and tried to explain to him that there were other ways to learn computers. But the recruiters relentlessly maintained the seduction. He signed up shortly after his 18th birthday. Trained in California. And a few weeks ago was shipped out to Kuwait. ("They lied to him!") Michele said her daughter bursts into tears whenever she thinks about it. I can imagine that young man, and so many other young men and women like him, stranded out there now in a continually threatening "hostile enviornment", in a place where so many pro-war pundits had promised them-- promised all of us-- that the entry of US troops would be "a cakewalk". A cakewalk, by the way, is a sort of fun contest people used to engage in at county fairs here in the US; also, a jazz-era dance. What it is NOT is what those young soldiers have been sent out to endure. Yeah, Michele, they lied to all of us.

"PRECISION" GUIDED MISSILES? HOW'S THAT? Every time there's a war, the Pentagon assures that, "our missiles have gotten a LOT smarter since the last time." And so now, once again, we're promised that they're using the smartest missiles ever. You'd think, wouldn't you, that if a missile is so darned "smart" then it should be able to arrive at, say, a military headquarters without harming a nearby market-place? But how about this: this time round, the Pentagon has guided missiles that are so unbelievably dumb that they not only miss the intended target building-- they also miss the intended target country altogether!! And this has happened not just once but, according to high-level Pentagon briefer Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, as quoted in an article in today's Washington Post, "about seven times." I'm not quite sure what "about" seven radical mis-aims means in this context. But that was the number of times, according to McChrystal, that US Tomahawks and other supposedly "smart" missiles have slammed into countries other than Iraq. At least once into each of Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. Turkey and Saudi Arabia were both so pissed off by the phenomenon that they rapidly forbade the US from even flying their Tomahawks over their national terrains. This question of much-dumber-than-promised munitions needs to be taken carefully into consideration when we listen to claims from Pentagon spokespeople about the US conducting this war "in a more surgical way than ever before", or claims that "the military is actually even exposing its own people to significant risks in order to minimize civilian casualties." We need to start with a clear understanding of the lethality of some of these munitions. The "Little Boy" atomic bomb dropped over Hiroshima in 1945 had an explosive force equivalent to 10-12 kilotons of TNT. The biggest (and also, reputedly "smart") bombs that the US military is dropping over Iraq these days have an explosive force of 2 kilotons. So six of them would provide the explosive force of one Hiroshima. In Hiroshima, of course, many of the subsequent fatalities came from the after-effects of the radiation released by the bomb. But nearly all of the physical damage caused by the bomb-- the destruction, by fire, of the entire downtown area, and the incineration of the people living there-- came from the sheer force of the blast and the many fires it sparked throughout the city. In Hiroshima, too, the damage was multiplied by the US Air Force's fiendish decision to set the detonation of the bomb to occur NOT when it reached the ground, but some 600 meters up in the air. That distributed the effects of the blast much more broadly. In the case of the US's present arsenal, "air burst" of some bombs including the infamous MOAB has come back into vogue again. So we are talking about some extremely unpleasant and lethal munitions in the US arsenal. Not the kind of "tool" that you would want to give anyone to use irresponsibly. What does "responsible" mean in this context, I wonder? It's a known "fact" of statistics that if a system has a failure rate of X percent, then you can reasonably predict that if you use the system Y x 100 times, you could expect X x Y of those operations to result in failure. So if you know that the guidance system on your "smart" munition is going to fail X percent of the time, then the more missiles you fire, the greater the number of mis-aims. Gosh, this is SO elementary. But then, it's also a known fact of running any kind of complex system, that the more complex its operations become, the greater the chance of human or other error. So as your "Y" value above becomes greater within the same period of time, it ends up multiplying your failure rate by more than a factor of Y. You get my drift. These guys have fired thousands of PGMs into Iraq these past ten days. According to that same W. Post article, McChrystal said that just counting the Tomahawk sea-launched cruise missiles alone, 675 have already been fired. (I think each one costs around $2 million, by the way. So that's $1.35 billion of "our" tax money going whoosh, right there.) And that's not mention the heavy stuff being dropped by the B-52s, and the JDAMS, and everything else. Very complex operations indeed. So it was entirely foreseeable that, in these circumstances, a non-trivial number of these very lethal munitions would end up mis-aiming. In the W. Post article, reporter Jonathan Wesiman wrote: "McChrystal told reporters there is no indication of a serious technical problem with the sea-launched cruise missiles. More than 675 have been launched since the beginning of the war, he said. The failure rate at this point is about 1 percent, and in most instances, the errant missiles did not explode. The warhead on a Tomahawk is not supposed to activate until it nears its target. One Pentagon official said that with a weapon system as sophisticated as a precision-guided cruise missile, a failure rate of 5 percent would be considered 'very good.'" I think these statements from McChrystal and the nameless Pentagon official need unpacking a little. McC accurately did the math to get figure of 1 percent. (That's the figure for the number of Tomahawks that fell on the wrong country, remember-- not just the wrong house, or the wrong city-block.) And we learn that, "in most instances" the mis-aimed missiles did not explode. He notably did not say, "in all instances." That's pretty scary. And then, this un-named guy (okay, I'm just hazarding a wild guess here as to the gender of Wesiman's Pentagon official) says that for something like the Tomahawk, even a failure rate of "5 percent" would be considered very good. How's that again? If you've launched 675 missiles as massively lethal as the Tomahawks, and as "few" of them as 5 percent, that is, 33.75 Tomahawks (or let's say "about" 38 of them) end up going to the wrong place-- the wrong country, say, or the wrong city-block, or even just the wrong building-- then that is not just "acceptable", not just "good", but "very good"?? These people are-- I've said it before-- very dangerous, and criminally insane. It's not just that they treat the rest of us like idiots when they assume we can't do the math on the consequences of very heavy, very complex bombardments with massive munitions. It's that they don't seem even to be able to imagine that the kinds of figure for "failure rates" that they talk about so glibly have actual and devastating consequences on the lives of actual human beings. So let's bring this madness to an end. Please. Let's end the bombing right now. And let's bring our soldiers home before they do any more damage to the world and to their own, already badly damaged psyches. Addendum: Bob Fisk had a story in today's Independent, datelined from the Shu'ale portion of Baghdad, in which he reported on the "at least 62" civilians who were killed by an errant missile there Friday. He reported on a key shard of metal he saw there: The missile was guided by computers and that vital shard of fuselage was computer-coded. It can be easily verified and checked by the Americans – if they choose to do so. It reads: 30003-704ASB 7492. The letter "B" is scratched and could be an "H". This is believed to be the serial number. It is followed by a further code which arms manufacturers usually refer to as the weapon's "Lot" number. It reads: MFR 96214 09. The piece of metal bearing the codings was retrieved only minutes after the missile exploded on Friday evening, by an old man whose home is only 100 yards from the 6ft crater. Even the Iraqi authorities do not know that it exists. The missile sprayed hunks of metal through the crowds – mainly women and children – and through the cheap brick walls of local homes, amputating limbs and heads. Three brothers, the eldest 21 and the youngest 12, for example, were cut down inside the living room of their brick hut on the main road opposite the market. Two doors away, two sisters were killed in an identical manner. "We have never seen anything like these wounds before," Dr Ahmed, an anaesthetist at the Al-Noor hospital told me later. "These people have been punctured by dozens of bits of metal." Can someone who reads this help to track down that "manufacturer", or any other details about the missile? (I'm thinking "ASB" may be air-to-surface ballistic?)

LESSONS FROM AN EARLIER GULF WAR: When US citizens talk about a "precedent" for fighting in the Persian Gulf region, they're almost always talking about "Operation Desert Storm". In that 10-week war in early 1991, the US-led-- but also UN-authorized-- international coalition succeeded in realizing the war's central aim of reversing Iraq's occupation of all of Kuwait and re-installing the Kuwaiti Emir to his throne. What US citizens don't talk about as much-- and many members of them don't even seem to know much about this history-- are two earlier campaigns at and around the northern end of the Gulf that provide very sobering lessons about the present situation. The first of those was the British campaign into Mesopotamia, 1914 - 1918. I wrote about that on JWN, Friday night. The second was what I call the Very First Gulf War of the Modern Era , namely the war Saddam Hussein launched (with some help from the reagan administration) against neighboring Iran in 1980. That war lasted till 1988. Well, I wrote about that war , too, Friday. Some slightly rambly musings. (As I've noted on JWN previously, I sort of "use" this blog like five-finger exercizes to get the old gray cells working.) But in the course of writing that post/essay, I went back into the Christian Science Monitor electronic archive-- which blessedly stretches back to January 1980-- and picked out all the pieces I wrote back in September and October 1980 when I was covering the beginning of that war from the Iraqi side. (My then-husband was, at the same time, covering it from the Iranian side.And our two infant kids were back at home with the nanny in Beirut, where a local militia decided to place a sniper on the roof of our apartment house... It was a totally stressful time.) But back to Saddam's war plans at the time. His idea was to launch an invasion of Iran with the express aim of bringing about regime change there. Since the regime in question was the Iranian revolutionaries, he thought he could count on at least a blind eye from the world's big powers, all of whom hated Ayatollah Khomeini at the time. And how was the Iraqi campaign-- which the lackey media in Baghdad all compared to a famous battle in Islamic history called the Battle of Qadissiyeh-- supposed to achieve regime change? Why, it would sow distrust of the Ayatollahs' regime among the Iranian masses. And concurrently with the launch of the Iraqi military campaign, eager Iranian exile politician Shahpour Bakhtiar had assured the Iraqis-- from his home in so-distant Paris-- that he just "knew" that Iranians of all tribes, classes, and subdivions would almost immediately rise up against Khomeini and overthrow him... I think the war started on the night of September 22-23, 1980. My first file to the CSM from Baghdad was in the September 25 edition of the paper. (It was not particularly insightful or distinguished. More the journalistic equivalent of a postcard home: "Look! I got here!") In the paper of September 29, my reporting was becoming a bit more substantive: The air raid sirens started their ululating screech at 9:20 in the morning this Sunday. The heavy traffic that was building up along the city's wide thoroughfares and its six bridges across the twisting Tigris River was halted almost in its tracks. Civil defense units steered cars into side streets and hurried their passengers into doorways and underground shelters. Barely half an hour later the single note of the "all clear" galvanized the busy city back into life. Despite frequent such air raid warnings -- and false alarms -- spirits remain high, and enthusiasm for the war effort against Iran remains undimmed. The enthusiasm is fanned by a daily diet of motivational material supplied by the state-controlled media. Television has a round-the-clock program of military documentaries... supplemented increasingly in recent days by the national TV's own films of Iraqi infantry and tank units continually advancing into Iranian territory, mainly over reddish-brown sand dunes... By October 1, the atmosphere seemed already to have changed: Leaders of the ruling Baath Party here have changed their tactics in their confrontation with neighboring Iran. But their goal appears to be the same: the speedy downfall of Ayatollah Khomeini's Iranian regime. The militant statements and military aggressiveness evident here in the past week have been replaced by a new, more moderate image and a slackening of the military effort... The Iraqi armored and infantry [forces] who last week thrust 35 miles into Iranian territory northeast of here are this week standing by, with some apparently being deployed back from the combat areas. In that piece, I reported on a press conference given by Foreign Minister Saadoun Hammadi, which I described as clearly showing, "a sensitivity to the many other interests being damaged by the continued fighting -- most spectacularly, his [previous] promise that Iraq would try to restore, and perhaps even to increase, former levels of oil output after the fighting ends." I added that similar signs of "senisitivity" had also been shown by President Saddam Hussein in a televised midnight address to the nation: 'We have no dispute with the peoples of Iran,' President Saddam Hussein promised to a slightly bemused Iraqi audience fed hitherto on a daily TV diet of military fervor. We wish all the peoples of Iran well," the President continued... Most significantly, I reported that within hours after that, Saddam announced he was ready for a ceasfire-in-place, and would welcome a diplomatic intervention by the UN to negotiate an end to the conflict. At the time, I reported that my pro-regime contacts in Baghdad were giving the spin that this was a fiendishly clever move by Saddam to try to hoist Khomeini on the petard of his own well-known inflexibility: They seem to be banking on the Ayatollah's own amply demonstrated inflexibility to aid them in the next stage of the game. With Saddam Hussein appearing almost angelically moderate in comparison, he is hoping to line up extra diplomatic and international pressure to bear against the ayatollahs of Iran. From today's viewpoint it is hard to tell whether Saddam's request for a ceasfire was actually a ploy, or whether it was the logical consequence of a realization that may well have started to sink in for his people by then: namely, that there was not going to be any massive anti-regime uprising inside Iran. Be that as it may, what seems important to note as of today is that Khomeini did indeed prove to be inflexible. He did not accede to Saddam's request for a ceasefire-in-place. (Under international law, he was in no way obliged to do so. The Iraqi forces were, after all, still occupying great chunks of his country?) Instead, the Iranian leadership sent human waves of ill-trained young men into the front-line and hurled them against the Iraqi occupiers... It took a further eight years of devastating warfare, and the lives of around a million people both sides of the line, before that war was brought to an end. In my post yesterday, I was focusing mainly on the role the Reagan administration played, giving strategically-timed amounts of help to each of those national leaderships in an evidently successful attempt to keep the fires of conflict stoked and to keep both nations trapped in chronic warfare. And on Bombs-Away Don's particular role in all that. Today, I want to focus more on that terrible strategic miscalculation Saddam made, in september 1980, when he launched the war in the confident expectation that it would be accompanied by a mass, anti-regime uprising inside Iran. I don't think I need to belabor this particular point for you, my alert readers from all over the world... So I think I'll just end up with some other excerpts from my reporting from that war. The first was reported from Qasr e-Shirin, an Iraqi-occupied Iranian-Kurdish town northeast of Baghdad. (It also appeared in the October 1, 1980, edition of the paper. But my surmise is that I'd filed it a day earlier than the piece I cite above.) There are occasional glimpses of the remaining residents of the town, though many have fled back farther into Iranian territory. Half a dozen women wearing printed jackets over basically dark-colored robes are in deep discussion with one tank crew. The women have large (and empty) food pans in their hands. "You should have come here yesterday," says one of the Iraqi officers. "We organized a general distribution of foodstuffs here in the main square, and the townspeople formed a queue that long." He waved expansively. "You see, before the Iraqi Army came here three days ago, the town was cut off from supplies. And the Khomeini agents who were here didn't organize any help for the citizens. "Only the Iraqi Army has helped them," he summed up. "Though, of course, we are not here to stay. It was just to bring Khomeini to his senses that we came here." And then here, from a piece in the October 6 edition of the paper titled, "Across the river, world's largest oil refinery lies in smoldering ruins." This piece was cutely datelined from Siba, a place slightly southest of Basra that has the twin distinction of (1) being the reputed site of the Garden of Eden, and (2) having the un-Edenic distinction of lying right across the narrow Shatt al-Arab waterway from the huge Iranian refinery complex at Abadan. At his headquarters back about a mile from the riverside front line, the volubly friendly infantry captain considered things were "going well." We ate lunch with him there, served by khaki-clad, pistol-toting girl volunteers. "We have right on our side, so we're bound to win," the captain said, as he skillfully dodged questions about actual military dispositions. The situation, as I could ascertain it, was that the Iraqis had virtually surrounded Abadan and nearby Khorramshahr, cutting off at least one of the roads linking them with Ahvaz to the north. But the Iraqis had not yet actually penetrated into the two key riverside cities. They were prevented by the reportedly fanatical resistance of Iranian troops and irregulars defending them, as well as by a reluctance to cause excessive harm to the cities' considerable ethnic Arab populations. Well, I'm sure no-one needs to work very hard to discover the numerous parallels between the Iraqis' situation then, in their campaign against Iran, and the US leadership's situation today, in its campaign against Iraq. It is all so, so tragic, and so unnecessary. I, by the way, am going to go to a store this afternoon to buy some yellow ribbon to put on the anti-war signs in our front yard. In the US, displaying yellow ribbons signifies a concern for troops serving in dangerous places overseas. I hope that mine, as attached to my anti-war yard signs, will send a loud message to the effect of: "Support our troops! Bring them home NOW!"

GEOPOLITICS OF THE GULF 101: Why are so many Iranians inside and outside the regime taking evident satisfaction at the imbroglio to their west? Had it occurred to anyone in the present US administration that maybe, just maybe, there's a history there? Here's some of what AP is reporting out of Teheran today: "Hundreds of thousands of Iranians demonstrated, denouncing both 'Bush's barbarism' and 'Saddam Hussein's dictatorship'... Demonstrators pelted the British Embassy in Tehran with stones, breaking windows and shouting for the embassy to be closed... The cleric who delivered the Friday sermon that was broadcast on Iranian television, Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi, said: 'Will bombs and the use of force bring democracy and freedom? It definitely will not.' The worshippers responded with shouts of 'Death to America!' and 'Death to Britain!'' So okay, imagine you're an Iranian. Back in 1978 you had probably, like most Iranians, supported the revolution against the dictatorship of the Shah, though maybe you'd have shared some of the many common reservations about the Islamic theocracy that filled its place. Still, after the excesses and idiocies of the Shah's era, you were probably willing to give the revolutionaries a chance. Then in September 1980, there was a vicious military assault against your country. Saddam Hussein, your militantly secular, Arab-nationalist neighbor to the west sent a nasty expeditionary force into your country-- with the aim of sparking local anti-regime uprisings and bringing down your government. I was there, in Baghdad, at the start of the Very First Gulf War of the Modern Era, in September 1980... [For the rest of this fairly lengthy post, click here.]

THE BRITS SHOULD KNOW BETTER:  The strategic geography of Mesopotamia may seem distant, perplexing, and "exotic" to many in the United States. But, with all due respect to the British military, they should have known better than to let the Bushites take them along for the promised "cakewalk" into Iraq.

The Brits should have known better.  Actually, many Brits do.  Many Brits learned in their (our) history books about the problems encountered by the expeditionary force sent into Mesopotamia by the authorities in British-ruled India.

Those who weren't "lucky" enough to read those books can find out all about it on a good-looking site called First WorldWar.com (ironic subhead-- "The war to end all wars".)  The site even has a special section on the "Mesopotamian front" that lets you click down all the major engagement from the capture of Basra in November 1914 through the capture of Tikrit three years later, and finally, the Battle of Sharqat in October-November 1918.

Basra took the Anglo-Indian force 16days to capture from the Turks.  We learn that,  "In the face of distinctly unfavourable attacking conditions - heavy rainfall and its consequent mud bath, in addition to heat mirages - the British force found progress initially difficult to come by until the use of 18-pounder artillery succeeded in scattering defenders, most of whom escaped under protection of a heat mirage, unable to be pursued by cavalry in such thick mud.

But finally the Brits made it into the city:

In taking Basra the British-led force suffered under 500 casualties and the Turks in excess of 1,000.  Crucially the British had secured and ensured a continuation of oil supplies in the Middle East: a matter of paramount importance.

[Oil supplies were a factor because of the huge refineries in the "Persian" city of Abadan, just across the Shatt al-Arab from Basra.]

After that, slowly--very slowly-- the British-Indian force plodded northward.  The battle reports covering the next 18 months speak repeatedly of problems with supply lines, terrible physical conditions, confusion about the loyalties of various tribes, etc etc.  Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose, eh?

Then, in April 1916, came the First Battle of Kut al-Amara. By now, the Brits, who'd been trying to pursue an aggressive strategy of "forward defense" found their garrison of 10,000 troops in that eastern-Mesopotamian city besieged.  They brought up a 30,000-man force to try to relieve it, but in a series of engagements the Turks inflicted heavy losses. "1,200 British casualties were incurred alone on 6 April, with additional losses suffered the next day and on 9 April."

By April 22, the losses among the relieving force had reached 23,000.

"Accordingly Sir Charles Townshend [the British commander of the Kut garrison ~HC], having consulted with higher authority, surrendered unconditionally on 29 April 1916 having failed to purchase parole for his 10,000 men with a £1million offer.

"It was the greatest humiliation  to have befallen the British army in its history. For the Turks - and for  Germany - it proved a significant morale booster, and undoubtedly weakened British influence in the Middle East."

After that debacle, London seized direct command of the front from Delhi, and reorganized the battle plan.  The new front commander Sir Frederick Maude demanded and was given a decent-size force of 150,000 men, and was finally able to re-take Kut in February 1917.  As I recall it, those British POWs from inside the city who still survived at that point were taken out of the city with the departing Turks, but I may be wrong. I certainly have vague memories of stories of some terrible hardships that they suffered.

... After the recapture of Kut, the British had regained their momentum in Mesopotamia. (Which month was it that the Yanks entered the war?)  Anyway, at the end of the day, the Allies "won" that war.  Though it did prove not to be "the war to end all wars."

It was a war, however, that inspired some fine anti-war poetry and prose.  You can find a bunch of that on that website, too.

CSM COLUMN OUT TODAY; AL-HAYAT COLUMN YESTERDAY: Busy times we live in.  The Christian Science Monitor column was titled "Military occupations - the good, bad, and ugly", which makes me think the copy editor who composed it must have read my earlier lengthy post here by that title...

I wrote the piece Tuesday, and then had a good, productive time working with my editor on it.  I do note, though, that in the layout phase the powers-that-be in Boston sliced up some of the middle grafs into single-sentence chunks.They say they sometimes need to do that to fill white space on the page. I say that it makes me look a little, well, staccato.

Not much reaction to that yet yet.  Talking of "reaction", though, I just signed up on something called Tag-board: once I get it installed into my template here will give me (give us all, y'all and me) a way to do short comments etc.  Fun!

And then yesterday, the latest of my twice-monthly columns came out in al-Hayat, the leading pan-Arab daily out of London.  They don't have an English-language version for me to link you to.  If you read Arabic, you can read it here.

That column, I actually wrote on Wednesday of last week.  A terrible day,because everyone knew that Bush's 48-hour ultimatum to Saddam would expire that evening.  And I knew, since I write my columns for them in English and they subsequently have to translate them, that it would almost certainly not appear until after the U.S. had already launched its threatened assault against Iraq.

That piece was titled (in English), "The anti-war movement moves to the next phase".  It attempted to make a sober assessment of the state of the anti-war movement here in the USA. Maybe after a couple of days, once Al-Hayat has milked it of every penny they can in syndication re-sells, I'll put a link to it up here.

(I have this rich fantasy life in which the publications that pay me their mere pittances to produce my wonderful columns for them are then turning around and making vast amounts of money by syndicating the same texts elsewhere.  Who knows, it might even be true?)

BILL SAFIRE GOES BESERK: I think that at heart of the present (and impending) imbroglio in Iraq lies not only a profound moral/ethical miscalculation-- to the effect that problems can be solved through violence-- but also a very profound political miscalculation: the one that predicted with seeming confidence that the Iraqi populace would certainly greet the arriving US troops as "liberators". It is true, and most certainly significant, that there are already signs of deep disquiet, back-biting, finger-pointing, and just general CYA from inside the Pentagon regarding many operational aspects of this war. See, for example, the quotes in Thomas Ricks' really interesting article in today's Washington Post. The piece is titled, simply and ominously enough, "War could last months, officers say." Its lead reads: "Despite the rapid advance of Army and Marine forces across Iraq over the past week, some senior U.S. military officers are now convinced that the war is likely to last months and will require considerably more combat power than is now on hand there and in Kuwait, senior defense officials said yesterday." In the body of the piece, there are numerous quotes, on background, from an un-named U.S. Army general and other un-named administration officials. Ricks also uses on-the-record quotes from retired Army General Barry McCaffrey, and retired war-planning specialist Maj. Robert Killebrew. (Interestingly, much of what Ricks writes about seems to track positively with the excerpts I cited in my post Tuesday, about the Russians' apparently impressive ability to listen in on high-level Pentagon communications... Worth watching this more, I think.) But possibly the funniest (saddest?) part of Ricks' article came near the end when, in an attempt I suppose to beef up the required "balance", he notes that, "Some Pentagon insiders and defense experts vigorously contested these pessimistic assessments." And then, the first of these folks whom he quotes is-- ta-da!!-- Newt Gingrich, the infamously ignorant and mean-spirited former Republican Speaker of the US House of Representatives who is now on Richard Perle's just-plain-infamous "Defense Planning Board". (Before Gingrich two-timed his wife Marianne, she was on the payroll of an Israeli settlers' organization, as I recall.) At the heart of the present and set-to-continue strategic/operational imbroglio are issues like how fast the US ground forces should be moving forward, and how hard the US military in general should be bombarding the Iraqi cities. These are tough issues indeed for military planners to make a judgment call on. (And they also have truly heart-wrenching consequences, either way, regarding the life-chances of the combatants and civilians on the battlefield.) But we have to recognize that antecedent to the design of the present US forces' present operational plan was the essential political judgment, as articulated most clearly last week by Vice-President Cheney, to the effect that once they entered Iraq the US forces would be greeted by the vast majority of the Iraqi people "as liberators". That has not happened, and as of now it is highly unlikely that it will happen on any significant scale anywhere in the country (except, of course, in the already long-"liberated" north of the country. But that would be nothing new.) Where did that very grave political miscalculation come from? Cheney and Richard Perle are among the administration (or, administration-linked) officials who have articulated it most clearly. But behind them stands a phalanx of well-connected, extremely rightwing commentators and intellectuals who try to pass themselves off as "Middle East specialists" when the need requires. The very same people who have sponsored Iraqi opposition "leader" Ahmed Chalabi all along -- even though there has been plenty of evidence in the past that Chalabi's claims to be able to speak for and about "all Iraqis" have been grossly exaggerated. Right now, those claims have been ground firmly into the mud that is engulfing many US encampments in the lower Tigris valley. (Sorry about the metaphor confusion there.) So how are these radical rightwing ideologues dealing with the fact that the promised pro-US uprisings have nowhere taken place? First of all, apoplectically. Second of all, by engaging in wild finger-pointing and saying something to the effect that that, "Well, that just proves how repressive Saddam Hussein is, because his people are out there, right now, stomping on all the free souls who would otherwise be doing the uprising... " Actually, since I grew up in England, I have a simpler explanation. I was born in 1952, but my family and community's folk-culture was full of stories of the London Blitz. And the main story-line there was the way that, under intense bombardment from an outside power, Londoners came together despite their many class and political differences and rallied round their national leadership and their national symbols. There are many other examples of that phenomenon in the history of the 20th century. (Stalingrad has already been mentioned in connection w/ Baghdad.) It actually takes an extremely brutal and sustained bombardment of a city to cause its leaders and people to cave... Which brings me to Bill Safire, uber-cheerleader for Ahmed Chalabi (as for Ariel 'Bulldozers-Away' Sharon); and to Safire's truly remarkable and disturbing column in today's New York Times. This column is, disingenuously enough, titled "Help Iraqis Arise". In most of it, Safire puts forth his own feisty version of the argument that "the fact that Iraqis haven't risen against Saddam yet is just further proof of how repressive and heinous he is". But at the end, Safire becomes downright terrifying. He writes, "President Bush and Prime Minister Blair, meeting today, should emulate their World War II predecessors. They should pre-empt proposals for bombing halts and armistices with a ringing statement about the only way to end the war: by unconditional surrender. Change the leaflets and broadcasts. No talks about terms; no amnesties for paramilitary killers; no deals on exile for torturers. Surrender, plain and simple." Excuse me? How would we get such a surrender? Is he honestly proposing the use of the same means that forced the German and Japanese surrenders in 1945? Lest we forget, those means included the fire-bombings of Dresden, Tokyo, and numerous other cities in the two countries -- not to mention the use of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I am appalled. Saddened. Horrified. If somebody has such a sick mind that he would recommend following this path today, he needs to be hauled off to DC's fine psychiatric hospital, St. Elizabeth's. Please, someone do this. For all of our sakes. [And next up on JWN: News of my column in today's CSM; and an assessment of how the Iranians are sitting by and enjoying seeing their two sworn enemies slug it out in the mud of Mesopotamia.]

MILITARY OCCUPATIONS, PART 3 (RE-POST): [Editorial note: I was working on my index, and this post, which was originally posted at 7:17 p.m. last Saturday, March 22, seemed not to have gotten put into either the March 16-22 archive, or the March 23-29 archive. So I'm re-posting it here in the hope that it DOES get archived this time. Plus, I am now PAYING Blogger for their 'Pro' level of service, so they better shape up! Thanks, friends from Blogger! Re-post follows.] I first met Uri Avnery, the veteran Israeli peace activist, in a PLO office in Tunis in the mid-1980s. Uri has sure hung in there over the years! (I saw him at the Tel Aviv offices of his present organization, Gush Shalom/ the Peace Bloc , just last June.) Today, I got an email from GS, in which Uri had penned some very thought-provoking notes about the present US-Iraqi war. Among them were the two notes that follow: [I should note that I'm a little troubled by Uri's apparent recourse to group-stereotyping in the title of the first of these notes. But that's what he chose. And the content of what he writes there is really important. Plus it tracks totally with what I wrote in my recent lengthy screed on comparative military occupations. Anyway, over to Uri... ] # Beware of the Shiites. The troubles of the occupation will start after the fighting is over. Here is a personal story and its lessons: On the fourth day of the 1982 Israeli attack on Lebanon, I crossed the border at a lone spot near Metulla and looked for the front, which had already reached the outskirts of Sidon. I was driving my private car, accompanied only by a woman photographer. We passed a dozen Shiite villages and were received everywhere with great joy. We extracted ourselves only with great difficulty from hundreds of villagers, each one insisting that we have coffee at their home. On the previous days, they had showered the soldiers with rice. A few months later I joined an army convoy going in the opposite direction, from Sidon to Metulla. The soldiers were now wearing bulletproof vests and helmets, many were on the verge of panic. What had happened? The Shiites received the Israeli soldiers as liberators. When they realized that they had come to stay as occupiers, they started to kill them. When the Israeli troops entered Lebanon, the Shiites were a down-trodden, powerless community, held in contempt by all the others. After a year of fighting the occupiers, they became a political and military power. The Shiite Hizbullah is the only military force in the Arab world that has beaten the mighty Israeli army. Sharon is the real father of the Shiite force in Lebanon. Bush may well become the father of Shiite power in Iraq. The Shiites, 60% of the Iraqi population, have been until now down-trodden and powerless. When they will realize that the Americans intend to stay, they will start a deadly guerilla. Bush does not intend to leave Iraq, as Sharon did not intend to leave Lebanon. Then what? America will argue that Iran, the great Shiite neighbor, is behind the Shiite guerilla. In Iran there is a lot of oil. That�s the next target. # Germany. Germany is against the war. Against any war. In no other country was the anti-war outburst so authentic, emanating from the innermost feelings of the masses. And who is furious about this? Israel, the country of the Holocaust survivors. How do they dare, these damn Germans, to object to the war? A sad irony of history: all German TV stations show citizens, intellectuals and ordinary folk, who pray for peace, all Israeli TV screens show retired generals, obviously enjoying themselves, discussing with great relish how to employ giant bombs and other instruments of death. ... So folks, if you want to see more of what Uri writes, and what his organization does, go to their site. Toda and Shalom, Uri.

THE RUSSIANS ARE LISTENING? I guess a lot of people around the world have become used to the idea that the US government, or their friends in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, listen in on just about everyone's cellphone and other supposedly private conversations. But now, do the Russians have sophisticated listening capacity that can capture some internal US government communications as well? There's an interesting website called "War in Iraq" -- don't know how long it's been up, but not long-- that posts just-about-daily reports about the US war in Iraq, and gives some excerpts from what purport to be the texts of intra-US contacts as captured by Russia's military intel, the GRU. In an English-language post today, the site says: A particular point of concern for the US command is the huge overuse of precision-guided munitions and cruise missiles. Already the supply of heavy cruise missiles like the "Tomahawk" has been reduced by a third and, at the current rate of use, in three weeks the US will be left only with the untouchable strategic supply of these missiles. A similar situation exists with other types of precision-guided munitions. "The rate of their use is incompatible with the obtained results. We are literally dropping gold into the mud!" said Gen. Richard Mayers [sic-- HC] during a meeting in Pentagon yesterday morning. [reverse translation from Russian] The US experts already call this war a "crisis". "It was enough for the enemy to show a little resistance and some creative thinking as our technological superiority begun to quickly lose all its meaning. Our expenses are not justified by the obtained results. The enemy is using an order of magnitude cheaper weapons to reach the same goals for which we spend billions on technological whims of the defense industry!" said Gen. Stanley McCrystal during the same Pentagon meeting. [reverse translation from Russian] Since the early morning today the coalition high command and the Joint Chiefs of Staff are in an online conference joined by the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. This meeting immediately follows an earlier meeting last night at the White House. During the night meeting with President Bush emergency actions were outlined to resolve the standstill in Iraq. The existing course of actions is viewed as "ineffective and leading to a crisis". The Secretary of State Collin Powell warned that, if the war in Iraq continues for more than a month, it might lead to unpredictable consequences in international politics. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Mayers reported on the proposed actions and corrections to the plan of the operation in Iraq. George Bush demanded that the military breaks the standstill in Iraq and within a week achieves significant military progress. A particular attention, according to Bush, should be paid to finding and eliminating the top Iraqi political and military leadership. Bush believes that Saddam Hussein and his closest aides are the cornerstone of the Iraqi defense. During today's online meeting at the coalition headquarters Gen. Franks was criticized for inefficient command of his troops and for his inability to concentrate available forces on the main tasks. According to [Russian military] intelligence Pentagon made a decision to significantly reinforce the coalition. During the next two weeks up to 50,000 troops and no less than 500 tanks will arrive to the combat area from the US military bases in Germany and Albania. By the end of April 120,000 more troops and up to 1,200 additional tanks will be sent to support the war against Iraq. A decision was made to change the way aviation is used in this war. The use of precision-guided munitions will be scaled down and these weapons will be reserved for attacking only known, confirmed targets. There will be an increase in the use of conventional high-yield aviation bombs, volume-detonation bombs and incendiary munitions. The USAF command is ordered to deliver to airbases used against Iraq a two-week supply of aviation bombs of 1-tonn caliber and higher as well as volume-detonation and incendiary bombs. This means that Washington is resorting to the "scorched earth" tactics and carpet-bombing campaign. I haven't had the time to track the performance of this site very much at all. Are they offering what they purport to offer? Can anyone else give me a lead on this? Aaah, it's been a long time since I really got into Russian-watching. Then, it was called Soviet-watching. My Russian is pretty rusty, but I could make out that a recent posting on their Russian-language mother site, Voyna v'Irake (War in Iraq) was titled, "Analysis: the tactic of David and Goliath". I think everyone recognizes that information, and disinformation, are playing a crucial part in this war. As in all wars-- but maybe more than in most other wars, this time around. The Russian military and the Pentagon both, evidently, have capabilities in this regard. But still, I think I'll try to track this site a bit, see how realistic its analyses turn out to be.

CONTINUING TO ARTICULATE AN ALTERNATIVE TO WAR: Today, I wrote my column on "comparative military occupations" for the Christian Science Monitor. Once again the writing went more quickly because I'd thought most of the text through beforehand. It'll be in the paper Thursday. Meanwhile my visa-ed passport arrived back from the Tanzanian Embassy. Next task: figure out getting the Mozambique one. Plus, where to stay in Maputo, Jo'burg, and Cape Town. I love planning trips! Anyway, last night, Bill, three other U.Va. profs, and I were all on a panel discussion organized by the university's African-American studies center. About the war. Slightly last-minute organizing, so not huge turnout. But definitely bigger than what the Charlottesville Daily Progress (Daily Regress?) reported. The reporter there was correct that the panel had "most of the weight on the left side of the table." But I learned afterwards that at least one other faculty member who would have anchored the other end of the table declined to appear with the rest of us. By the way, the Prog also had a nice report on the High School walkout I wrote about here yesterday. Again, the number of participants was underestimated there. Anyway, in the course of our panel discussion, I really reached some clarity on something I'd been worrying about since the war began. Yes, we know we failed to prevent the war being launched, but what can we in the antiwar movement plausibly say right now? Well, for starters, I already knew that the argument that dissent at home "can harm our troops abroad" is a very dishonest one. It was not us who placed the troops in harm's way. That significant feat was achieved the moment the President decided to launch the war. But of course I care about the wellbeing of the US troops-- as I do for the wellbeing of everyone caught up in that hellzone of war. Now, one thing I did during the 1991 Gulf War, that later I came to think was a mistake, was to adopt the argument that, "since I know that war is brutalizing and ugly, then the best thing all round for minimizing the total amount of harm caused by the war is to hope for a rapid and decisive outcome." I heard that precise same argument being voiced last night by Jim Childress, a distinguished professor of medical ethics here at U.Va. And a version of it also by my spouse. So that reminded me of the many concerns I have had about that argument ever since I used it in 1991. Firstly, it sort of "assumes" that the US is going to win. So one ends up cheering on the effort for a rapid and decisive US victory. That felt strange enough for me to be doing when I did it back then-- yes, I actually wrote columns to that effect, not necessarily with much cheering, but making that exact argument. But at least then, the US war effort had a much stronger basis in international law. The present one doesn't, so cheering it on in any way involves supporting what I see as forces of global vigilanteism. Secondly, it means that one gets emotionally into the danger of eliding the nasty reality of the war, and one gets caught up in planning for the after-war. But I think it's important to resist those temptations In particular, it's important to continue being able to say, today, tomorrow, or any other time before the "end" of this war, that THERE IS STILL AN ALTERNATIVE TO WAR. Even today. Even any other day, whether the news from the battlefield is "good" or bad" from the US military viewpoint. And what I feel quite comfortable saying is that on any one of these days, President Bush can still call for an immediate ceasefire-in-place, and call on the United Nations to help negotiate a resolution to the imbroglio in Iraq. Why not? There is an always an alternative to violence, and I think it is up to those of us in the peace movement to be able to propose what that might be. And we are lucky, oh so lucky, that we still--even if only barely-- have an international body like the United Nations that has the international legitimacy and global networks capable of taking over such negotiations. I should imagine Kofi Annan and the leaders of the vast majority of the world's countries would be delighted to have the U.N. play such a role. (Well, okay, maybe Kofi wouldn't be "delighted", since dealing with the massive pol-mil-humanitarian mess inside the country will be a horrendously difficult task. But I imagine that he would, at least, be ready to shoulder this task; and he'd presumably see that as a course far preferable to watching the violence and destruction just continue.) Of course, I fully recognize that for Prez Bush to make such a turnround is, in the present circs, fairly unlikely. I realize that for the hawks in his administration, such a decision would represent the ultimate defeat of their world-defying strategy. But just because it's unlikely that Bush would heed our call that he stop fighting and turn the issue over to the UN for a negotiated settlement, does that mean we should not utter it, should not organize around it? Of course not! It's equally unlikely in my humble opinion that he'll heed our calls to do the right thing by the health, education, and other social programs inside this country. But does that unlikeliness prevent us from organizing around our demands for the fulfillment of urgent social needs? No, of course it doesn't... So anyway, I was glad to have that bit of clarity come to me last night. Today, though I was writing something I consider to be important (for the CSM) about the after-war, I made sure to put in at least a couple of sentences about the fact that we still, even now, don't need to just stay fatalistically on the war-wagon. And I articulated my still-valid, proposed alternative to continuing the war.

"THE 17-YEAR-OLD" ASSERTS HERSELF: Yesterday, she was on my case again. "Mom, why do you call me that? It's so demeaning!" I tried to explain it was related to an old joke. But that it was too complex to explain. She carried on. "Besides, in your March 1 post, you talked about the dog having a slipped disk before you said anything about the so-called 'seventeen-year-old' having a bad injury. What's up with that?" Okay, mea culpa. I'm really, really sorry. So folks let me introduce you to: Ms. Lorna Quandt! What's more, Lorna's not just any 17-year-old but a talented young woman who with a bunch of her friends from Charlottesville High School today organized a walkout by 250 students in protest against the war. Read all about it (with pictures!) on George Loper's website. George is a great community activist here in Charlottesville, VA, who has really enriched community life by using his site as a sort of public bulletin board for discussions and news of what's going on around town. The CHS students did a fabulous job of organizing their action; and they did it all on their own. And the school administration and the local police were both also quietly cooperative of the school students getting to exercise their right of free speech... Two hundred fifty students is around 25 percent of the school's student body. When the demonstrators got on the local t.v. news tonight, the ones who were interviewed were all stunningly articulate. And they really spoke from their hearts. The school should be-- probably is-- very proud of them. These are kids, of course, who-- if the war and/or the state of occupation drag on for any length of time-- may well be subject to the draft. The young men among them, that is. But I think they all already know some recently graduated high schoolers who got lured into the military by recruiters who promised them that was the way to get job training, or learn computers, or whatever. So the whole business of the war has a scary immediacy for the high schoolers that it may not have for many of us older folks. Our city only has one high school, which therefore takes in kids from nearly the whole demographic of the city's population. The University of Virginia, which is located here, has a student body that, by and large, comes from a much narrower (= higher-income, more upper-middle-class) demographic. The level of antiwar activism in the high school seems MUCH higher than that among the U.Va. students! In this country, in general, relatively fewer young people from higher-income families than from lower-income families volunteer for the armed forces-- since they have so many other options in life. So maybe the difference in activism levels we see among the young people in our city is related to the level of social/economic privilege that many U.Va. students enjoy, and to their relatively greater isolation from from knowing many people who actually serve in the military. I guess it was the new Oscar winner Mike Moore who noted, in his recent letter to President Bush, that only one serving member of the U.S. Congress has a son or daughter in the armed forces. (MM suggested, too, that Bush should maybe send his own daughters over to join the fray.)

BLOGGING AS FIVE-FINGER EXERCISES: For some reason, two of my sisters have both expressed a concern that my blogging "might be taking too much of my time". (All three of my sisters live on the far side of the Atlantic Ocean, in England. Sometimes I wonder how much they talk about me behind my [very distant] back, as it were. I don't spend much time speculating about it though, because-- well, you know-- I have a life.) So anyway, my general response to that is that, for me, blogging is like doing warm-up exercizes for my formal writing. (Sorry about the atlantically indeterminate spellings around here.) Case in point: my lengthy thinking-out-loud post last Friday on the subject of comparative military occupations. Today, I needed to consult w/ my editor at the CSM about the topic I would be writing a column on, for a probable spot in this Thursday's paper. "Comparative military occupations" was my main suggestion-- and the one she leaped at. (Leapt at?) Of course, cramming my main points on this into 800 words, while translating the text from blog-ese into CSM-ese, will still be quite a task. But writing the column will be a darn' sight easier because I really have done a lot of thinking-it-through while-- and since-- writing about the subject here. And now to bed. Lots going on around here that I don't have time to write about. But when I go to bed, I start thinking about-- all the poor benighted souls in the hell-zone that the warhawks have turned Iraq into; my Syrian journalist friend Ibrahim Hamidi who got arrested back in December, shortly after I talked with him in Damascus; all political prisoners everywhere-- what is "going to bed" like for them, every night? -- and the tortured souls in Palestine and Israel who seem so incapable of escaping from their ever-turning treadmill of fear and violence. So I just give blessings after blessings that I can have a great home and family in such a calm place as here. We had a wonderful Meeting for (Quaker) Worship this morning. Luminous! And we have daffodils now-- finally-- blooming around the blue peace signs in our front yard... And another blessing: my dear old friend and erstwhile colleague in the Middle East peace-and-justice movement Saad Ibrahim was acquitted last week, by the Egyptian courts, of all remaining charges against him. Hallelujah! (It's over a year now since I wrote a column in Al-Hayat that gently mocked the Egyptian government for continuing to pursue its case against him. I don't know whether that column had much good effect. Let's hope so. Last month, when my husabnd was in Cairo, he got a little bit of time to catch up with our old friend Ahmed Maher, the Egyptian Foreign Minister. AM told Bill that he often reads my Al-Hayat columns with some enjoyment-- but he thinks I'm still "ways too idealistic". That makes me so happy! I would just hate it if some event-- turning 50, say-- had caused me to lose that idealism. Actually, I'm working pretty hard on becoming a Raging Older Woman for Peace, or something.) Whoa. Didn't I say it was time for bed?