Middle East Politics

Matt Yglesias announces the institution of “Krauthammer Friday”:http://yglesias.tpmcafe.com/blog/yglesias/2006/aug/11/the_krauthammer_charade_part_i

bq. Charles Krauthammer’s columns are published on Fridays. Thus, I hereby proclaim a new recurring feature — the second Friday of every month, we’ll revisit the man’s January 18, 2006 column, “The Iran Charade, Part II” in which he confidently proclaimed — contrary to the judgment of every relevant intelligence agency — that “Iran is probably just months away” from a nuclear bomb.

But even better, to my mind, was Krauthammer’s confident judgement on Iraq WMDs back in “April 2003”:http://www.aei.org/events/filter.,eventID.274/transcript.asp.

bq. Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We’ve had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven’t found any, we will have a credibility problem.

Indeed.

Following on from last week’s post on Hezbollah’s War Crimes, it would seem appropriate to follow up with a discussion of the actions of the state of Israel with respect to the Geneva Conventions. Human Rights Watch has an excellent and thoroughly-researched report on the subject of whether the civilian casualties in Lebanon have been the result of collateral damage to legitimate military actions, or whether there have been instances of illegitimate, intentional or excessive violence against civilians. It concludes that there is certainly a case to answer. There is also the issue of whether the war crime of “reprisals” has been committed – the carrying out of acts of violence against civilians in order to put pressure on their government to carry out some desired course of action, which is of course called “terrorism” when non-state actors do it.

I had prepared a post on this subject, but the Human Rights Watch report is so much more thorough that I think it’s better to base discussion on that (by the way, the comments on the Hezbollah war crimes post were very civilised and intelligent, let’s repeat that). My summary of the report’s conclusions would be that the proposition that the IDF “takes the utmost care to minimise civilian casualties” has been falsified to a high degree of certainty, and even the weaker claim that the IDF does not intentionally target civilians looks a lot less certain than one would previously have believed. The attacks on infrastructure such as the LibanLait dairy look not at all like legitimate attempts to shut down Hezbollah and very much like attempts to intimidate the Lebanese population; unless we are prepared to postulate a truly colossal series of blunders, it looks very bad indeed.

Israel has in the past been able to maintain, with some justification, that there can be no “moral equivalence” between its actions and those of the terrorists; an important point when the physical effects of the IDF’s actions have been so many more deaths than the physical effects of terrorism. Whatever the jus ad bellum, this issue of jus in bello matters a lot, and speculation about the long term genocidal aims of the President of Iran simply cannot justify war crimes now. The gradual disintegration of the clear distinctions between the conduct in war of Israel and that of its enemies, which are very important in maintaining Israel’s international diplomatic reputation, ought to worry the Israeli government a lot more than it apparently does.

“Alex Tabarrok”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/08/fiasco.html

bq. In Fiasco Thomas Ricks’ says the war on Iraq and subsequent occupation was ill-conceived, incompetently planned and poorly executed. I have no quarrel with that. What dismays me is that anyone expected any different. All wars are full of incompetence, mendacity, fear, and lies. War is big government, authoritarianism, central planning, command and control, and bureaucracy in its most naked form and on the largest scale. The Pentagon is the Post Office with nuclear weapons. If this war has been worse on these scores than others, _and I have my doubts_, we can at least be thankful that the scale of death and destruction has been smaller. At the Battle of the Somme there were a million casualties and 300,000 deaths over the course of a few months. If we remember previous wars more fondly this is only because those wars we won. Incompetent planning and poor execution are not fatal so long as the other side plans and executes yet more incompetently. Is this a suggestion to put the current war in context? Not at all. It is suggestion to put government in context.

This is not a good argument. That the massive bureaucracies of war involve waste and duplication is undeniable (although history doesn’t give us any reason whatsoever to believe that markets would do a better job). But to say that the incompetence with which the Iraq war was conducted was simply business as usual is not only to get Rumsfeld _et al._ off the hook for the quite specifically personal incompetence that they displayed and are still displaying. It’s to make a general claim that can’t be supported using the evidence that you claim is supporting it. An incompetently conducted war does not a general case against government make. Indeed, if you wanted to make a polemic case for a strong state and _against_ market reforms, you could quite easily use post-war Iraq as an example of how “massive contracting-out of military work to private actors”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1103566,00.html, “mass demobilization of an army”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A63423-2003Nov19?language=printer and “privatization and free trade”:http://www.harpers.org/BaghdadYearZero.html lead inevitably to political disaster. Not that I believe the Iraq experience actually supports so sweeping a claim – while the decisions in question all were bad ones in the context of post-war Iraq, this context is not generalizable. The argument that post-war Iraq demonstrates the badness of privatization everywhere would be a very poor argument indeed. But then, so is the argument that the Iraq war demonstrates the badness of government everywhere.

The Guardian has “a piece by Julian Borger”:http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/julian_borger/2006/08/post_279.html on the different versions of the Lebanon war being presented to British and American audiences. It seems that British reporters have focused far more on the the sufferings of the Lebanese, with lots of eyewitness interviews with distressed people there, whereas the Americans have concentrated far more on the perpective from the bomb-shelters in northern Israel.

The _Financial Times_ says that the Bush administration is “engaged in a quiet U-turn on troop numbers.”

bq. The US administration has quietly reversed its goal from whittling down troop numbers in Iraq before the mid-term congressional elections in November. A Pentagon spokesman on Friday confirmed that US troop levels in Iraq rose to 132,000 during the past week – the highest since late May – from 127,000 at the start of the week. The spokesman said troop numbers often fluctuated and “there might be temporary spikes during periods of troop rotation.” However, analysts said an increase in troop numbers was more likely than a reduction because the number of sectarian killings in Iraq had almost doubled since the start of the year. The rise will prompt fears that the US is becoming increasingly bogged down in an unwinnable conflict. … Richard Armitage, who was US deputy secretary of state until January 2005, said: “The US has almost totally reversed the troop situation from two months ago. The danger is that this is too little and too late and that the US will turn into a bystander in an Iraqi civil war it does not have sufficient resources to prevent.”

I haven’t posted on Iraq in a long time, because I’m not sure that I’ve anything useful to say. All the options facing the US are grim, and I don’t know which is the least grim. What I do know is that when we hear something like:

bq. Kenneth Pollack, a former US National Security Council official, said: “The numbers should probably be roughly double what they are. We are seeing the right plan but completely inadequate resources to make it work.”

we can be sure that the Pollack plan plus a pony will get you peace in Iraq. Regardless of whether a doubling of troop numbers would in fact bring peace (a claim that I seriously doubt), it’s clear that those troops aren’t there to send out in the first place. The US military is badly overstretched as it is.

Not so much in the interests of spurious balance, but because it provides a way to deal with a number of general issues of international law in a more neutral framework, I thought I’d consider what war crimes have been committed by Hezbollah in the course of the present conflict. I am not an international lawyer, though I have had reasonable luck in the past arguing points of international law on the Internet. I am leaving comments enabled for the time being, though I would like all commenters to respect the principle that the blame game is not zero sum, and in specific application to this case, the fact that one side is committing war crimes does not absolve the other side from their obligation to obey the law.

Throughout this post, I am assuming that Hezbollah can be considered as a separate military entity and that its troops are being judged according to the law of war rather than as civilian criminals (or for that matter, as “illegal combatants”). I think that this is fair enough; the Geneva Conventions are rather vague on what constitutes a legitimate military entity, but my opinion is that if state sponsorship was a necessary condition this would have been explicitly stated and it seems to me that it would be hard to argue that Hezbollah are not guerillas under Protocol I. Although the Conventions seem to mainly be considering cases of civil war rather than cross-border aggression by parastates I personally believe that they apply. More under the fold.
[click to continue…]

If you aren’t reading “Billmon”:http://billmon.org/ on the war in Lebanon, well you should be.

From one of his “more recent posts”:http://billmon.org/archives/002581.html :

bq. I’ve been watching events in the Middle East off and on for the past 25 years, and I’ve seen the Israelis get ugly before. But I can’t remember a time when I’ve seen them this ugly — Ariel Sharon’s scowling mug excepted, of course. It’s almost as if bits of Sharon’s DNA have been duplicated and injected into the entire Israeli cabinet and the general staff: Massively disproportionate use of force (as defined in the Geneva Conventions, not the fevered war porn fantasies of Right Blogistan) reprisal terror bombings, an if-it-moves-shoot-it mentality on the ground:

bq. “Over here, everybody is the army,” one soldier said. “Everybody is Hezbollah. There’s no kids, women, nothing.”

bq. Another soldier put it plainly: “We’re going to shoot anything we see.”

bq. And now a proposal to turn all of southern Lebanon into a free fire zone.

bq. This all might be considered normal military behavior for, oh say, a Bosnian Serb militia captain, circa 1991, but when the political and military leaders of an allegedly civilized state start talking this way, something big is going on, and going wrong.

UPDATE: A couple of people have emailed to make the point that the two quotes from soldiers need to be read in the context of the previous paragraph of the report from which they are taken, which reads:

bq. Now more Israeli soldiers are on the way, including an armored unit being transferred from Gaza to Lebanon. They have been told civilians have left the region where they will fight.

Perhaps that makes those soldiers’ remarks less damning as indicators _of their personal attitudes_ , but it rather raised the question of who is telling them the falsehood that civilians have led the region and why, since their acceptance of that falsehood might well lead them to kill non-combatants. In the context of Billmon’s post as a whole — which you can read by following the link — it is clear that the “proposal to turn all of southern Lebanon into a free-fire zone” is a reference back to statements by the Israeli Justice minister Ramon, and not a conclusion based on those quotes from soldiers.

The “New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/27/world/europe/27cnd-mideast.html today.

bq. We received yesterday at the Rome conference permission from the world,’’ Justice Minister Haim Ramon told Israeli radio, “to continue this operation, this war, until Hezbollah won’t be located in Lebanon and until it is disarmed.’’ Mr. Ramon also raised the possibility of an expanded air assault, saying “all those now in south Lebanon are terrorists who are related in some way to Hezbollah.’’

[as with my other posts on Israel, where our past experience has been one of vicious fights between pro- and anti-Israel commenters, I’m keeping the comments section closed. I’m not happy about this either.]

Via “Kevin Drum”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2006_07/009218.php, this quite disgusting “claim”:http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-dershowitz22jul22,0,7685210.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail from Alan Dershowitz.

bq. Hezbollah and Hamas militants, on the other hand, are difficult to distinguish from those “civilians” who recruit, finance, harbor and facilitate their terrorism. Nor can women and children always be counted as civilians, as some organizations do. Terrorists increasingly use women and teenagers to play important roles in their attacks. The Israeli army has given well-publicized notice to civilians to leave those areas of southern Lebanon that have been turned into war zones. Those who voluntarily remain behind have become complicit.

Irish and British readers may find this line of reasoning familiar. It was advanced by the IRA at the height of its murder campaign. According to the IRA, civilian bystanders, including women and children, who were killed when bombs blew up police officers or soldiers should have known better than to be associating with the security forces or socializing in places that they were known to frequent. These bystanders were complicit in their own deaths. It was an utterly contemptible argument then. It’s just as contemptible today.

As is true everywhere else in the world, Australian news reports at the moment are dominated by the fighting in Lebanon. But much more than in other countries, news reports here are dominated by the dangers facing Australian citizens in Lebanon, and the problems of arranging an evacuation. Lebanon is a major source of migration to Australia and, at any given time, as many as 20000 Australian citizens are visiting the country, and a smaller number living there on a longer-term basis. With the current crisis coming as a near-complete surprise, most of them want to get out as fast as possible. This has proved just about impossible, with the airport closed and no guarantee of safe departure by road or ship. The only really safe way out is on a warship, and Australia’s nearest armed vessel is 17 days away. There are also around 10 000 Australian citizens in Israel, some within reach of Hezbollah rockets.

[click to continue…]

Michael Walzer has “a piece in the New Republic”:http://www.tnr.com/user/nregi.mhtml?i=20060731&s=walzer073106 which addresses the question of how Israel may legitimately prosecute its war in Lebanon. There’s much to agree with in the piece, especially since Walzer is clear about the impermissibility of deliberately killing civilians and deliberately destroying the infrastructure necessary to support civilian life. There’s also much with which I disagree. Walzer tends to take IDF claims about the extent to which they actually do seek to minimize civilian casualities at face value; the reports from Lebanon would seem to support a more sceptical stance. I was, however, brought up short by this:

bq. the Israeli response has only a short-term aim: to stop the attacks across its borders… Until there is an effective Lebanese army and a Palestinian government that believes in co-existence, Israel is entitled to act, within the dialectical limits, on its own behalf.

Now I don’t dissent from the proposition that Israel is entitled to act to stop attacks across its borders. But Walzer’s linkage of that claim to the capacity of the Lebanese government is surely perverse. The claimed legitimacy of many of the Israeli actions has hinged on the failure of Lebanese government to act and on its legal responsibility to do so. Attacks on facilities outside the Hezbollah zone of control have been conducted with this explicit justification. But if it is part of the case for action that the Lebanese government actually lacks the capacity to act — as it surely does — then those operations were wrong.

Israel can’t simultaneously base its justification for action on the responsibility of the Lebanese government to act _and_ on its incapacity to do so, except insofar as it limits itself to actions that an effective Lebanese government would be duty-bound to perform, namely, suppressing Hezbollah. But Israel hasn’t limited itself to such actions, it has attacked other Lebanese targets.

The Walzer justification could surely only be offered in good faith by a party that was also committed to enabling the Lebanese government to exercise effective sovereignty over its territory. The Israeli attacks aren’t strengthening the post-Cedar-revolution government, they are increasing the probability that Lebanon will once again descend into being a failed state.

Trying to make sense of what Israel is actually doing is hard, in my opinion. I don’t believe that Israel can destroy Hezbollah by direct military action, and I’m sure they don’t believe so either. The point of their action can’t be to get the Lebanese government to act, because, as the Walzer justification insists, they lack the capacity to do so. So what are they trying to do? My guess, is that they are trying to exploit the US commitment to a post-Syrian Lebanese order to bounce the US into acting against Syria and Iran. “Take action Condi, or we’ll screw an important plank of your Middle East policy” is the message, and this might indeed be an effective way to get Hezbollah to stop firing rockets. If Iran or Syria pushed Hezbollah to provoke Israel (and I think it very likely they did) then presumably they’re also trying to pressure the US to make a deal in some way whilst they can. Lebanese civilians are expendable chips in what looks like a high stakes game of diplomatic poker.

One of our loonier commenters referred yesterday to the “locally predominant anti-Israel consensus” at Crooked Timber. Odd that. One of our contributors strongly identifies with Israel and I spoke up last year against the proposed academic boycott by UK academics. (One unexpected consequence of which was that I was absolutely deluged for a while by emails from pro-Israel lobby associations, keen to share with me their view of the latest Palestinian outrages. No wonder bloggers of a certain disposition don’t struggle to find material to relay.) We don’t have any kind of a party line on Israel at CT, but my guess is that most of us share the view that many sensible Israelis have. Namely that an eventual solution will involve two states with something like the 1967 borders, and that it would be better if that came about sooner and with less bloodshed rather than later and with more.

All of which is a preamble to saying that “the current actions of the Israeli government”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/5177346.stm , in bombing facilities like Beirut Airport and a power station in Gaza, in deliberately making civilians suffer (and in many cases causing their deaths) are illegal and disproportionate, words that don’t do justice to the bloody reality. Collective punishment and reprisal are not permissible actions, but that is plainly what is going on here. Lebanese people are being killed as a matter of policy in order to put pressure on the Lebanese government. There is also the matter of the Israeli government continually referring to actions against its soldiers as “terrorist”. At other times they have made a big deal out of the unwillingness of news organizations to use the term, but when they openly seek to gain the rhetorical benefits of the word in relation to actions that are plainly military, though irregular, they illustrate why the BBC and others operate the policy that they do.

Saying this is not to offer apologetics for Hamas or Hezbollah. Seizing soldiers as prisoners of war may not be illegal, but seizing anyone to use them as a hostage plainly is. And there seems to be evidence that Hezbollah’s actions are part of a power play by a Syrian government that once again sees Lebanon and Lebanese civilians as expendable pawns. But what Israel is doing in Lebanon and Gaza at the moment is wrong, and that needs to be said.

UPDATE: See Jonathan Edelstein at “The Head Heeb for some further comment”:http://headheeb.blogmosis.com/archives/032451.html .

The British “pro-war left” blog Harry’s Place, to which we still link in our sidebar, has recently expanded its roster of bloggers. One of the new crew, Brett Lock, has now posted “a lengthy diatribe”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2006/07/12/a_little_pizza_jordan_a_little_pizza_israel.php about the sinister campaign that has led Palestinian schoolgirls to bake a Pizza in the shape of a Palestine that appears include Israel too. This on the basis of an article in a small circulation London local paper. I thought this kind of thing — objectively terrorist cake-blogging — was the preserve of Fafblog or The Onion, or of wingnuts like Malkin (remember the “crescent-shaped” UA93 memorial?). Whatever next?

What a disaster:

One example out of many comes in Ron Suskind’s gripping narrative of what the White House has celebrated as one of the war’s major victories: the capture of Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in March 2002. Described as al-Qaeda’s chief of operations even after U.S. and Pakistani forces kicked down his door in Faisalabad, the Saudi-born jihadist was the first al-Qaeda detainee to be shipped to a secret prison abroad. Suskind shatters the official story line here.

Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. … Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda’s go-to guy for minor logistics — travel for wives and children and the like. That judgment was “echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President,” Suskind writes. And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as “one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States.”…

Which brings us back to the unbalanced Abu Zubaydah. “I said he was important,” Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. “You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?” “No sir, Mr. President,” Tenet replied. Bush “was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,” Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, “Do some of these harsh methods really work?” Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, “thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target.” And so, Suskind writes, “the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.”

I can practically hear the little tearing sounds as Jim Henley rips the remaining hairs out of the top of his own head.