Middle East Politics

Marty Lederman on the revelations in today’s NYT.

“[James] Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be ‘ashamed’ when the world eventually learned of it.” [Would] that it were so. Between this and Jane Mayer’s explosive article in August about the CIA black sites, I am increasingly confident that when the history of the Bush Administration is written, this systematic violation of statutory and treaty-based law concerning fundamental war crimes and other horrific offenses will be seen as the blackest mark in our nation’s recent history—not only because of what was done, but because the programs were routinely sanctioned, on an ongoing basis, by numerous esteemed professionals—lawyers, doctors, psychologists and government officers—without whose approval such a systematized torture regime could not be sustained.

Jon Pike (Open U) has emailed me about an initiative he has launched to get the question of whether or not there should be an “academic boycott” of Israel put to the entire membership of the union. As CT readers will know, I’m opposed to the academic boycott. But even if I weren’t, the idea that this issue should be decided by a small group of activists strikes me as absurd and undemocratic. So I urge all British academics who are members of the UCU to support Jon’s initiative and sign the petition .

UPDATE: It turns out the whole question is moot, as the UCU has acted on advice that any boycott would be illegal.

An essay by Akbar Ganji that ran in The Boston Review a few months ago had one of the more striking contributor’s notes I have ever seen:

He is working on the third installment of his Republican Manifesto, which lays out a strategy for a nonviolent transition to democracy in Iran, along with a book of dialogues with prominent Western philosophers and intellectuals. He plans to return to Iran, where, he has been told, he will be re-arrested upon his arrival.

On the occasion of President Ahmadinejad’s trip to New York, Ganji has written an open letter to the Secretary General of the United Nations. It has received more than three hundred endorsements from around the world, among them Jurgen Habermas, Ziauddin Sardar, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Juan Cole, and Slavoj Zizek.

A copy was just forwarded to me by Nader Hashemi, a fellow at the UCLA International Institute, with the request that it be disseminated as widely as possible. The full text follows:
[click to continue…]

I just caught the last chunk of David Petraeus’s statement. As Kevin Drum predicted the other day, the Chaos Hawkery was strongly to the fore at the end. I haven’t seen a transcript yet, but the bottom line—after a Westmoreland-like catalog of investment projects and advisory teams—was, “This is a hard road, I can’t assure success, but if we leave I guarantee failure, regional chaos and the rise of Iran and other neighbors. Also, there’s no end in sight.” All of this was well forseen by Petraeus-watchers, of course. But it’s worth going back to this month four years ago when the logic of this approach, now fully articulated in Petraeus’s statement, was becoming clear.

[click to continue…]

Ow, ow, ow. Comment 2 is also pretty funny. Actually, the whole thread is hilarious.

Jack Snyder, Robert Shapiro and Yaeli Bloch-Elkon are presenting a paper at the APSA meeting next week that’s of considerable interest in its own right, but that also sheds some light on the recent debate between Dan Drezner and Glenn Greenwald. [click to continue…]

Good stuff. Someone should hire this guy. (Via Unfogged.)

Johan Hari has reviewed Nick Cohen’s What’s Left? for Dissent . It is well worth a read.

While looking back at whether Iraq was “all about oil“, I thought it might be a good idea to check on the US reconstruction program, and found the State Department report for April 2007. The lead items are electricity generating capacity and oil output, which used to be followed eagerly by those in the blogosphere arguing that the MSM were ignoring “Good News from Iraq”. As Tim Lambert and Jim Henley pointed out a couple of years ago, the same good news kept getting announced over and over again, but the prewar levels (average electricity output of 4300 MW, availability of 11 hours per day, oil output 2.5 million barrels per day (MBPD)) were never surpassed.

We don’t hear quite so much about good news from Iraq these days. The original good news blogger Arthur Chrenkoff shut up shop a while ago. Winds of Change picked up the baton, but seems to have given up. Google finds this site with three entries this year, none containing any actual good news, and this quasi-official site, apparently produced by the Defense Department, and mainly reproducing press releases. It’s not clear whether press releases containing bad news are excluded or whether no such releases are issued.

So, I’ll pick up the ball and summarise the news in the State Department’s report. At this stage, 99 per cent of the US money has been committed, and 87 per cent has been spent, so there’s no more where that came from. Adding “new”, “restored” and “maintained” generating capacity, we get a total of 4373MW, which, assuming 80 per cent uptime, would correspond to average output of around 3500MW. Oil shows a capacity of 2.7MBPD and output of 1.9MBPD. (Table is over the fold). Then there’s the usual schools and hospitals, but these days both schools and hospitals in Iraq are very dangerous places to attend.

[click to continue…]

Matt Turner links to an article on contemporary Israel and its future . It is a remarkably even-handed, interesting, and generally civilized piece of journalism. All the more surprising, then, that the author is Christopher Hitchens’s ultra-conservative brother Peter and that it appears in Britain’s most repulsive newspaper, the Daily Mail.

I’m confused. According to the many media reports, the UCU, successor to the AUT and NATFE and the main trade union representing British academics, has voted to reinstitute the boycott of Israeli universities that the AUT finally rejected last year. But in fact, as far as I can tell , the UCU Congress has done no such thing. Rather it has passed some rather wooly pro-Palestinian resolutions and has ordered its executive to promote discussion of the boycott at branches over the next year or so. The practical effect of this in the world is at best close to zero. In fact it is almost certainly negative: no-one actually gets boycotted but the worst elements of the Israeli right (and the likes of Alan Dershowitz) get a renewed opportunity to portray themselves as victims.

Aside from the general stupidity of the boycott campaign (well summed-up by Steven Poole last year), it promises to consume a lot of energy in fruitless arguments that go nowhere. Last time this happened I stood up on my hind legs at my local AUT branch and opposed the pro-boycott motion . I’ll vote against it again this time, when the opportunity presents itself. I have to say though, that I’m a lot less motivated to oppose the boycotters than I was. They are just as wrong as they ever were, but I’ve been sufficiently disgusted by Israeli conduct over the past year (especially in Lebanon) not to feel all that much enthusiasm for making a big effort. And then there’s the fact that when I did speak up against the boycott I received a load of offensive email. Normally, you’d expect to get such email from the people on the other side, telling you what a horrible sellout you’ve been. But I didn’t receive a single bit of hostile email from a pro-Palestinian persepective. Rather, I got a good deal from Likudniks and their American friends who mistakenly assumed that if I opposed the boycott I must share their vile perspective on Arabs generally and Palestinians in particular. (No thanks. Go away! I don’t want email from people like you.)

Martha Nussbaum’s article in Dissent puts the case against the boycott pretty well. However there’s one pro-boycott argument that she doesn’t address and which I’ve not heard a good reply to. It doesn’t, for me, outweigh the arguments against, but I do think it weakens the often-put “double standards” argument that anti-Israel measures unfairly discriminate against Israel since there are far worse countries in the world. (This is often accompanied by the further claim that because Israel is picked out whilst other countries are worse, the motive of the boycotters must be sinister and is probably anti-semitic.) The argument is this: that the Israeli perpetrators of injustice are far more vulnerable to outside pressure than, say, the Chinese or the Russians are. Measures taken against Israel therefore stand a better chance of being effective. The Russian treatment of the Chechens or the Chinese treatment of the Tibetans may indeed be worse than the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. But we can take action now to force the Israelis to negotiate and to end the injustice of the occupation, whereas we cannot act with similar prospect of success against Russia or China. Obviously that argument depends on a number of facts about the way the world is. And those facts are highly contestable. But it doesn’t depend (to the contrary!) on any claim that Israel is uniquely or even especially evil or unjust.