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Articles which have caught my interest. Mostly Israel stuff and other nubbins from the ongoing holy war.
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Thursday, March 13, 2003
Friendly Fire A major screw-up near Hebron this afternoon. An IDF force spotted two Israeli security guards and mistook them for terrorists. One of the guards was driving a car and apparently mistook the IDF force for terrorists disguised as soldiers. He took off and the soldiers opened fire massively on his car, killing him. The second guard was cut down by helicopter fire. This is the first friendly fire incident in the current hostilities with the neighbors, and the worst incident of this kind since Israel pulled out of South Lebanon. Mealy-Mouthed Journalism On a tangential note to the death of Zoran Djindjic, OpinionJournal tipped me off to this Reuters article according to which Djindjic was felled in "an apparent assassination". Which makes you wonder, apparent assassination? I can almost see the Reuters journalist at working being careful and circumspect. You can't be too hasty about these things, I suppose. One mustn't rule out the possibility that Djindjic was accidentally shot by maintenance workers trying to clear pigeons from the Parliament building in Belgrade. Or else, that he set the whole thing up himself as an elaborate suicide. It struck me a couple of times since 9/11 that journalism has become really namby-pamby. Reporters seem hesitant to state any fact without couching it in terms like "apparent". It reminds me of the incident where an Egyptian shot up the El Al desk at LAX last year. I remember CNN describing him as the "alleged gunman." The guy ran into LAX guns blazing until he was put down by an El Al security officer. A couple of hundred people witnessed the event. If this isn't enough to describe him simply as "the gunman" I don't know what is. And yet, today's journalist seems to treat everything and everybody as though they were on trial and thus guilty until proven innocent in a court of law. Either that or a lot of them have internalized the postmodern outlook that there is no such thing as objective truth, only viewpoints, and as such you have no right to describe anything in unqualified terms. Problems in Other Places The assassination yesterday of Serbian PM Zoran Djindjic is cause for a certain degree of alarm. On the most obvious level, us students of history recall what can happen when someone gets assassinated in the Balkans. But even assuming that Djindjic's death won't lead to another Continent-wide war, it still leaves plenty of pause. There have been conflicting reports yesterday whether Djindjic was assassinated by underworld figures or by supporters of Slobodan Milosevic, whom Djindjic helped turn over for trial in Holland. At the moment, things seem to be pointing to the latter option. Which, in the worst case scenario would seem to indicate that Milosevic's brand of vicious nationalism has not gone away and that the Balkan cauldron is still bubbling. At any rate, this incident should serve as a reminder about how far we are from a peaceful, "Star Trek"-type world and about how fragile democracy can be. Tuesday, March 11, 2003
Still Waiting... And the UN pantomime gets dragged along some more. Will there be a second resolution? Will Iraq be given a firm deadline to disarm? And will that deadline be next week, or the week after that, or the week after that, or...? Ehud Ya'ari, one of the senior commentators for Channel 2 news over here, has developed this annoying habit of saying that the Bush administration wants the war underway by Purim and over by Passover. As if GWB and company were sitting in the White House situation room with a Lubavitcher calendar planning strategy. However, Purim is next Monday and Passover is less than 5 weeks away and we're all wondering how long they'll drag it on. The New Republic makes a good case that the waiting game is beyond worthless. However, at the moment it seems that Tony Blair needs it to keep his political career alive so wait we do. Monday, March 10, 2003
Meet the New Boss? The Palestinian Legislative Council today approved the creation of a Prime Minister for the Palestinian Authority. This is seen as a step in reforming the PA, since in theory the Prime Minister will take over some of the powers currently vested in the PA's maximum leader Yasser Arafat. In theory, this is all well and good. The optimists hope that the Palestinian Prime Minister will be authorized to resume negotiationw with Israel. Since no Israeli leader will sit with Arafat anymore, the hope goes that they'll sit with the new guy, which is expected to be Abu Mazen, Arafat's number 2. Me, I'll believe it when I see it. For one thing the PLC hasn't yet approved Abu Mazen who is considered a moderate figure and relatively untainted by Palestinian terrorism. The other thing is that the PLC also hasn't defined the powers of the Prime Minister. They may decide that the Prime Minister only has authority to deal with internal Palestinian matters. Even if they do give the new PM sweeping powers and entrust him to negotiate with Israel, I'll bet any amount of money that Arafat will do his best to sabotage him. In short, assuming that Abu Mazen gets elected I say "Congratulations" and hope that the new government at least gives the guy a chance (not guaranteed, as Ha'aretz takes pains to remind us. However the distance between this and actual resumption of negotiations is far, and a change in the Israeli-Palestinian dynamic is even farther. As usual, wait and see. National and Post-National States An interesting interview with Josef Joffe, editor of Die Zeit, which reminds you that not all hope is lost for Europe. Joffe presents a fairly cogent analysis of the conflict between the Arab world and Europe on the one hand and Israel and the US on the other. Joffe points out that Europe has entered a "post-national" phase where things such as sovereignty and nationalistic identities become blurred as part of a bureaucratic framework like the EU. Israel and the States, on the other hand, are still in the national phase. "[W]e have gone through in the past several centuries, these states are also interested in not using their force for the benefit of national interests. All this gives them a feeling of moral superiority over societies that still remain in the national age."And herein lies the rub. Speaking as someone with a background both in Israel and the States, I can only see things from the national orientation. And from that orientation it looks like Europe has entered the kind of "Star Trek" phase of development, where everyone gets along with everyone else and problems are resolved diplomatically. Unfortunately, most of the rest of the world is still in the pre-Star Trek phase. Most of the rest of the world is still in the Hobbesian phase to one degree or another. (In fact, it could be argued that a lot of Europe -- viz its unassimilated Muslim populations -- are also pre-Star Trek). Given this situation, countries which throw up their hands and take a moral stance against war are doing nothing but inviting their own downfall. The US understands this but quite a few countries on the Continent -- and one large nation of cheese-eating surrender monkeys in particular -- either doesn't get it or desperately doesn't want to get it. On a related note, cranky historian Paul Johnson presents five lessons to be learned from the situation. Sunday, March 09, 2003
Because Sometimes a Little France-Bashing Just Isn't Enough As you may know, from time to time I engage in the great blogging sport on picking on Les Froggies. However, there seems to be almost no limit to the things you can take the French to task for and I don't have the energy to keep up with it all. Luckilly, some good and diligent folk have stepped in to fill this void. Ladies and Gentlemen, I am pleased to present Pave France. The Day After and the Ethnic Partitioning Issue Under the general question of what to do with Iraq the day after Saddam goes bye bye, the NY Times had a long profile last week of Kanan Makiya. Makiya (aka Samir al-Khalil) one of the leading philosophers of the Iraqi opposition in exile, that fractious collection of different factions (Shi'ites, Sunnis, Kurds) who have had a tendency to fight with each other and with the American government almost as much as they fight the dictatorship in Baghdad. In general, there are two main schools of thought about what to do with Iraq after Saddam. The Pentagon backs a plan which would turn the government over to the Iraqi exiles, similar to what happened in Afghanistan. The State Departnment thinks that a post-Saddam government should be formed with the Iraqis in Iraq. At the moment, State has the upper hand but it's all philosophical since a postwar Iraq will probably be governed by an American military governor for the first few years. Makiya recently helped author a document with even more radical ideas for democracy in post-Saddam Iraq. Among its conclusions, the report ultimately calls for the establishment of a heavily secular federal government in Iraq based on geographic (rather than ethnic) lines, along with a series of provisions to prevent tyranical rule by one group or another. As the article points out, were this system to be adopted in full Iraq would effectively cease to be an Arab nation. The plan partially relies on the idea of "Iraqi exceptionalism". This theory posits that the Iraqi people have suffered terribly as history's boot-scrape. The dream of pan-Arab nationalism quickly led to the dictatorship of the Ba'ath party, which begat the dictatorship of Saddam and his thugs from Tikkrit. Because they have been burned by dictatorship, the theory goes, the Iraqis will be most open to Western-style democracy. The supporters of this idea in the West hope that once Iraq transitions from tyranny to democracy, it will send shockwaves throughout the region and spur the fall of all the other dictatorships that make up the Arab world. Makiya has a radical idea, and one which is frought with peril. Any number of things could go badly wrong along the way, the worst being an open conflict between Turkey and the newly liberated Kurdish areas of Iraq. But, as the article points out, its power lies in its utter audacity. A democratic Iraq which manages to overcome the pull of tribal and ethnic loyalties could truly be a force for good in the region. This reminded me of an article by Christopher Hitchens in this month's Atlantic which deals with the issues of ethnic partition. Hitch looks at the tragedy and farce that came in the wake of partitioning of states. His focus is those areas of the globe which were formally part of the British Empire: the Indian subcontinent, Ireland, Cyprus and my own benighted corner of the Middle East. In each of these cases, the British drew semi-arbitrary national lines which in many cases were dictated by the ethnic makeup of the area. This created no end of problems. In many ways, a similar dynamic happened in Bosnia during the war there 10 years ago. In his Bosnia: A Short History, Noel Malcolm argues that the forces guiding UN policy towards Bosnia mad a fatal error by assuming that the best solution for the Balkans was partitioning along ethnic lines. Bosnia had existed for centuries as a relatively stable multi-ethnic entity. By taking the attitude that "all the ethnic groups hate each other so the best thing to do is separate them," the UN unwittingly played into the hands of Milosevic and his Serbian nationalists. On the conceptual level, Makiya's plan has a sense of nobility about it. But I can't see how it will be implemented, certainly not at first. The plan flies in the face of over 100 years of Arab nationalism. Given that the modern Middle East is seeped in nationalism, and was largely shaped (for better, but mostly for worse) by dreams of pan-Arab glory, this will be a tough biscuit for the Iraqis to swallow. IDF:4 Hamas:0 At the risk of sounding crude, the game of Whack-A-Mole with Hamas continues. Yesterday the IDF liquidated Ibrahim al-Makadme, one of the founders of the terrorist group and a member of its "political wing". This is another incident in the general (and regrettable) upswing in violence between us and the neighbors in recent weeks, and follows (but is not necessarily connected to) the IDF excursions into Gaza, the bus bombing in Haifa last week, and the ongoing rocket attacks on the southern Israeli town of Sderot. A few thoughts:
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