Breaking Up is Hard to Do

It's 2007, and we're surging ahead in Iraq, and our options are twofold: total victory-- liberal democracy, capitalism, multinational investment in Iraqi infrastructure (read: oil)--or utter defeat--cuttin' and runnin' ( kind of evokes a street thug snatching your grandmother's purse), theocracy, Muktada al-Sadr victorious, a Shia superstate with a hegemonic Iran sprinkled with Al-Qaeda Salafists in Sunni regions.

It's quite a dichotomy. Lucky for us, the reality, as it so often does, lays outside of the parameters presented to us by most in either major political party.

In The American Prospect, Flynt Leverett argues that the "best worst" option for Iraq is what he calls "soft partition". He notes that to Joe Biden's credit (and I rarely credit Biden for much except bloviating), Biden is the only Democratic presidential candidate to call for the wide degree of autonomy between the three separate regions in Iraq (that means regional control of oil resource), with the administration of Baghdad as a federal zone, policed, at least initially, by international forces, perhaps from the UN or the Arab League.

This seemingly traumatic thought---the breakup of a nation!--would in fact be the correction of a long and painful colonial misadventure by the British. It would give the Kurds the freedom they're going to take anyway. Furthermore, it would allow for the historically oppressed Shia to govern themselves, but also prevent them from exercising too much federal authority on Sunni areas, and thus oppressing their former oppressors.

Let's face it: the situation isn't getting any better, and we need to stop conforming our Iraq policy towards the creation of a fantasy state, begin pragmatically figuring out how to stem the execrable bloodletting, and begin constructing the least traumatic way towards a nominally functional Iraqi nation-state. Because it is going to be bloody, no matter what happens.

Perhaps, in an unintended irony, Condoleeza Rice was right when she called the war in Lebanon and the continued violence in Iraq the "birth pangs of a new Middle East." It looks like the Bush Administration has presided over the miscarriage of a nation.

A Message, From Hamas

From Salon:

The power struggle -- which a "government of national unity" under Hamas' prime
minister, Ismail Haniyeh, was meant to avert -- erupted with unprecedented
violence. Early in the week, Hamas militias abducted a cook from Abbas'
presidential guard and hurled him from the roof of a 15-story building. They
stormed the apartments of Fatah members with hand grenades and automatic
weapons, mowing down everyone in their path, including old women and small
children. More than 100 people were killed and 200 were wounded in the fighting.

There are a plethora of ostensibly mitigating circumstances to Hamas' belligerence, but ethics are universal, and this is haram.

The Umma and the Veil

Now, while I'm loathe to agree with Christopher Hitchens on much of anything these days, I'm hesitant to say that civilizational barriers seem to be very much in play regarding this uncomfortable news emanating from Pakistan today:

Pakistani Islamic scholars honoured Osama Bin Laden on Thursday in response to Britain's knighthood for Salman Rushdie, as a senior ruling party member said he would not hesitate to kill the novelist.

Meanwhile the country's religious affairs minister, who caused outrage by remarking that the award given to the "Satanic Verses" author justified suicide attacks, announced that he may visit Britain next month.

The Pakistani Ulema Council, a private body that claims to be the biggest of its kind in the country with 2,000 scholars, said it had given Bin Laden the title "Saifullah", or Sword of Allah, its top accolade.

So what is it: crass political retaliation for the knighting of Rushdie, or heartfelt sympathy for an indiscriminate serial murderer? Probably a little bit of both. Regardless, we should at least acknowledge that in some quarters of the Islamic world, Western notions of free speech carry little or no currency, subsumed as there are under the theological categories of what is Islamic or non-Islamic.

Thus it seems that we do, in fact, have a cultural--perhaps even civilizational--difference: a writer who ostensibly disparages Islam, and is thus handed a death sentence (a death sentence, by the way endorsed by Pakistan's Religious Affairs minister who said, in the Pakistani Parliament no less, that "I am a Muslim and then a politician and it is ordained in Islam that the punishment for a blasphemer is death. If this man comes in front of me I will definitely kill him,"), versus a murderous terrorist Salafist. Both are are handed accolades from important institutions within their own socio-cultural milieu. One traffics in ideas, the other in dead bodies.

While it is important to not stereotype a class of people according to a minorities views or actions, it is equally important to not ignore the real cultural differences that exist between some (very powerful) elements within the Islamic world and the fundamental tenets of liberal democracy.

The Bush Administration has discredited nation-building on both the Left and Right, and while the Iraq war cannot be regarded as anything but a catastrophic failure, and one that never should have occurred in the first place, the cultural differences between "the West" and the "Islamic world", are very real. It would be a great tragedy if the sophomoric, base, and militaristic approach of the Bush administration veiled the West to the world outside it.

A State of One's Own

What do we do now, in a post-Fatah Gaza Strip? In a brazenly realpolitik maneuver, the NY Times is now reporting that Israel and the United States are attempting to bolster Mahmoud Abbas and, Fatah, the same organization vilified under Yasser Arafat. This a day after that the European Union announced that, as Hamas was no longer represented in the Palestinian government, aid would resume being given to Fatah and the Palestinian Authority.

This is a strange legerdemain, given the history of Hamas. Hamas, it is well known, was funneled money by the Israeli government--Ariel Sharon himself initiated this tactic--in order to sow discord between Palestinians (commonly referred to in those days simply as "the Arabs" in order to deny them national aspirations) and prevent a cohesive national movement from forming from--and between--the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

And now the Israeli's are victims of their own success, and Hamas has won itself a giant cage for 1 1/2 million people. The Palestinian national movement is now at a dangerous ebb, as they have turned inward, the gnawing pit of of frustration and deprivation, of roadblocks and blocked visas, turning them away from their paramount aim--statehood--to internecine blood lust.

Ironically, Hamas's takeover of Gaza has now empowered Fatah in ways that Yasser Arafat could only have dreamed of. If only he had created a shadow Islamist army first, negotiating with this kaffiyah-masked alternative lurking in the background, perhaps he would have lived to see Palestine. For the stereotype often cast upon Palestinians (and Arabs in general) that "they only understand force", seems to work doubly well on the Israeli political establishment.

Then again, the IDF could simply use the event as a security pretext for reentering Gaza and further isolating Palestinian cities in the West Bank.

It is a banality when discussing Israel and Palestine to assert how critical the present moment is. But it would be negligent for us, in this truly critical moment, to allow the shrieking invective that so often characterizes discourse on the topic to distract us from the exigencies of the situation. We need a fundamental change in U.S. policy in the region--and fast--because we may be witnessing the end of the idea of both Israel (as a democratic and Jewish state) and Palestine (as a viable state at all). And that would neither serve the fervent supporters of either, or those of us whose hearts ache for the peaceful coexistence between the two.

Bush's Unintended Doublespeak: Sad Lessons from Home and Abroad

Here's an excerpt from a speech Bush gave yesterday:

It's impossible to make sense of such violence and suffering. Those whose lives were taken did nothing to deserve their fate. They were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now they're gone -- and they leave behind grieving families, and grieving classmates, and a grieving nation.

What is Bush talking about? The VA student shootings. In no way do I mean to diminish the horror of that event--we're all shocked, and that shock and anger transcends politics. But we should not let these events suspend the fact that horrors like these occur in Iraq everyday. Bush's statement applies perfectly to the daily horror that is Iraq. Not only that, but everyday these events occur, we are culpable, insofar as in democracy, a government purportedly represents the will of the people (and although we're far from a true democracy, we're still culpable in our relative laxity on the issue).

We need Bush--or someone from the American leadership, I truly don't care who, Republican or Democrat, all I want is someone to admit our role in Iraqi's suffering--that such events occur everyday there. Senseless violence. People simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Bush admitted it when it came to a university. Now he needs to admit it when it pertains to a whole nation. America has been shocked at a single day of random horror--terror in its truest sense--now we need to admit that this terror is daily life for the Iraqi people, the vast majority of whom are innocents, and thus "It's impossible to make sense of such violence and suffering. Those whose lives were taken did nothing to deserve their fate. They were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now they're gone -- and they leave behind grieving families, and grieving classmates, and a grieving nation."

Lie of the Day Award

“The bottom line is this,” Mr. Bush said. “Congress’s failure to fund our troops will mean that some of our military families could wait longer for their loved ones to return from the front lines. Others could see their loved ones headed back to war sooner than anticipated. This is unacceptable.”

Call me illogical, but isn't Congress trying to slowly end the war (too slowly for my own liking), and Bush trying to continue it in perpetuity? So how does this one work itself out?

A "Christian" Natural History

Read this. It gives new meaning to the phrase "old time religion."