UNCLE SAM LO VOLT:

May 5, 2006

Possible Darfur deal brings new hope (CNN, 5/05/06)

Sudan’s strife-torn Darfur region appears to be near a peace deal to end three years of violence that has exacerbated what the United Nations calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, officials said Friday.

The main rebel group has tentatively agreed to a peace deal with the government during talks in Abuja, Nigeria, according to a U.S. diplomat advising the talks.

The United Nations says 180,000 people have died from illness and malnutrition since rebels began attacking in February of 2003, and some 2 million have been forced from their homes.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, who’s attending the talks, told The Associated Press on Friday that participation by Minni Minnawi, who leads the largest rebel group, has been key.

Actually, only participation by the U.S. matters.

MORE:
Sudan, Main Rebel Group Sign Peace Deal (Glenn Kessler and Emily Wax, May 5, 2006, Washington Post)

The government of Sudan and the biggest Darfur rebel faction signed a peace deal today, declaring an end to three years of bloody conflict that has left tens of thousands of people dead and 2 million homeless. [...]

Deputy Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick, who has spent three days and nights shuttling between the parties in talks held in Abuja, announced the accord.

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Posted by orrinj

OUR ROLE IS TO DESTABILIZE:

May 3, 2006

The loose supercannon: The Age of War: The United States Confronts the World, by Gabriel Kolko (Allen Quicke, 5/04/06, Asia Times)

Since World War II the United States has been increasingly willing to use its military might to impose its will on the world. But it is not sure exactly what its will is, and it has never evolved a workable doctrine that specifies its global role and how and when force should be used to achieve its ends. The result is haphazard foreign-policy decisions and ill-conceived military adventures embarked on without an understanding of local conditions and in utter disregard of possible consequences. Besides, Kolko argues, military means seldom if ever achieve the desired political ends. Still, the US goes in, with massive firepower, its smart bombs thinking overtime and its superweapons primed, only to find more often than not that its awesome arsenal is utterly unsuited for the job at hand. Thus it gets sucked in to prolonged, escalating conflicts such as Vietnam and Iraq, and its original intentions are forgotten as it fights on simply to avoid defeat and humiliation – in other words, to protect its credibility as a superpower. The massive human, social and economic damage that it inflicts in the process serves to destabilize regions and create enemies that the US did not have before.

Add to this “shock and awe” the increasing economic inequalities abetted by the US-dominated World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and you have the ingredients for anti-American terrorism: desperate people with no other recourse, economically on the brink and having been on the receiving end of US firepower.

If some of this sounds familiar, it’s because it is standard anti-American fare. Yet the iteration of the facts behind such assertions is instructive. Let’s look at some of them, starting with a very abbreviated list of better-known US military interventions since 1950 (a similar list would have served Kolko’s argument well, yet it is missing from the book).

1. Korea, 1950-53
2. Egypt, 1956
3. Vietnam, 1962-73
4. Cambodia, 1969-75
5. Laos, 1971-73
6. Dominican Republic, 1965-66
7. Iran (hostage rescue attempt), 1980
8. Lebanon, 1982-84
9. Grenada, 1983
10. Libya, 1986
11. Panama, 1989-90
12. Kuwait, 1991
13. Iraq (no-fly zone), 1991-2003
14. Somalia, 1992-93
15. Haiti, 1994
16. Bosnia (with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 1995
17. Sudan, 1998
18. Serbia (with NATO), 1999
19. Afghanistan, 2001-present
20. Iraq, 2003-present

A fuller list, such as one provided byZNet, numbers at least 60 US military and/or covert interventions since 1950, excluding shows of naval/air strength, covert action and/or the use of proxy forces where the United States did not have command, and US pilots flying foreign warplanes. Instances in which the US has used proxy forces and/or covert action for regime change, for propping up “friendly” rulers, or to fight communism include scores of countries around the globe: Angola, Cuba, Venezuela, Indonesia, the Philippines, Namibia, Iran in 1953, Afghanistan in the 1980s, Iran again in 2006, to name just a very few.

And all this for what?

For this: “Just 25 years ago, there were only 45 democracies. Today, Freedom House reports there are 122 democracies, and more people live in liberty than ever before.”

As to the alleged ideological inconsistency over the years that we’ve been forcing that evolution, one need only compare this statement, this statement and this one to this one and this one in order to see that the assertion is nonsensical.

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Posted by orrinj

WHAT IF W MADE AN EPOCH AND NOBODY NOTICED:

May 2, 2006

Troop pact takes alliance with U.S. into new era: SDF will be handed a bigger role in operations (REIJI YOSHIDA, 5/03/06, Japan Times)

The final bilateral accord reached Monday in Washington on realigning the U.S. forces in Japan is not just about moving military units from one place to another.

It is an epoch-making agreement to achieve greater integration of the Self-Defense Forces into U.S. military operations, allowing Tokyo to play a bigger role in support of the U.S. forces beyond the scope of the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty, senior Defense Agency officials said.

“The Japan-U.S. (military) alliance has already become more than what the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty (stands) for,” said a senior Defense Agency official who engaged in the realignment talks, asking that his name not be used.

It’s possible to believe that the Realists who make up the foreign policy crowd are so locked into their narrow Atlanticist worldview that they genuinely don’t realize what’s going on around them, but you have to have at least a sneaking suspicion that if a JFK, Nixon, or even Clinton were forging an Axis of Good as sweeping and powerful as the one that George Bush is putting together it would be hailed as the historic achievement that it is.

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Posted by orrinj

OKAY, I'LL JOIN THE DECENT LEFT IF YOU PROMISE ME NO ONE WILL GET HURT:

May 2, 2006

The Options for Darfur: Liberal hawks, don’t do unto Darfur what you did to Iraq (Mark Leon Goldberg, 04.26.06, American Prospect)

[S]hould Khartoum continue to support the their proxy janjaweed militia, disrupt humanitarian access to Darfur, or launch aggressive military campaigns in Darfur, the United States should reserve the right to launch cruise missile or airstrikes against Sudanese military instillations. The regime in Khartoum values its fleet of converted Antonov transport jets above human lives. So why not threaten the government where it will hurt? The leaders in Khartoum are not bloodthirsty thugs for the hell of it. Rather, they devised a counterinsurgency strategy of genocide precisely because it was the most practical way to suppress a rebellion. It would not take much to make that strategy prohibitively expense for Khartoum by taking out a few dozen aircraft.

I do not propose airstrikes with great enthusiasm. They could be problematic for a number of reasons, not least of which is the potential that Khartoum follows Slobodan Milosevic’s lead and responds to an aerial assault by accelerating their ground war. But airstrikes would be a last resort, and unlike Milosevic, the regime in Khartoum is more likely to fold under the simple threat of such attacks.

The question, of course, is whether the United States seeks Security Council support to legitimize such airstrikes. The Chinese will most certainly object. To this, the Kosovo clause should apply: All available diplomatic options would have been exhausted and the urgency of the situation justifies the circumvention of a Security Council vote. This may put me in common cause with the hawks, but any airstrikes should come with the tacit understanding that no American troops will set foot in Darfur.

Getting folks like this to sanction what even their own consciences require is like pulling teeth. And when they pussyfoot about like he does here it just leaves them out of the serious conversations.

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Posted by orrinj

FEISTY ON:

May 2, 2006

Turkey’s ‘vaizes’ expedite reform (Nicholas Birch, May 2, 2006, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

Dressed in the head scarf and ankle-length coat that mark her as a devout Muslim woman, Sule Yuksel Uysal brushes off any suggestion that she is a revolutionary. But her job places her and her country on the front lines of Islamic reform.

Appointed 18 months ago by Turkey’s directorate of religious affairs, or Diyanet, Mrs. Uysal is one of 200 state-paid “vaizes,” or female preachers, whose very existence breaks with centuries of Muslim tradition.

Women acted informally as preachers in the early days of Islam, but they never before have been recognized officially as such.

“Turkey is a country that has accepted the idea of sexual equality, and that must be reflected in religious practice,” said Diyanet head Ali Bardakoglu, who implemented the changes. “Anyway, the Koran has taught the equality of men and women for 1,400 years.” [...]

Despite the problems, Turkish women in the past few years have benefited from a raft of changes aimed at legitimizing their place in the religious order.

As well as being preachers, women now have the right to lead groups on the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, and 15 Turkish provinces have women serving as deputy muftis — specialists on religious law who monitor the work of imams in mosques.

Significantly, given that 70 percent of requests for advice come from women, the assistant muftis have the right to issue fatwas, or religious opinions.

Theologian Hidayet Tuksal thinks these are crucial changes.

“Religion is the best way to reach religious women, much better than dictates handed down by secularist feminists in Istanbul,” she said.

Perhaps the best-known of a growing band of what the Turkish press calls Islamic feminists, Mrs. Tuksal attributes the changes to the rise of a new sort of Turkish woman who is feisty and not afraid to question tradition.

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Posted by orrinj

HARD TO ACCEPT HAVING WON:

May 2, 2006

Sudan rebels hold key to peace pact: Seek concessions as deadline looms Government ready to disarm militia (BASHIR ADIGUN, 5/02/06, ASSOCIATED PRESS)

With a midnight tonight deadline approaching after more than two years of talks here, Sudan’s government said it was ready to sign a peace accord with rebels from Darfur.

But the western rebels, suspicious of government intentions, rejected the draft by the African Union. They said it did not guarantee enough political power for Darfur or give enough detail on how it would be implemented. [...]

Rebels in the arid region the size of France have fought since 2003 what they see as neglect by the Arab-dominant government. Militias allied to Khartoum, known as Janjaweed and drawn mainly from Arab tribes, have worked to crush the rebellion. [...]

AU mediator Salim said the pact would create a transitional authority for the region, including rebel representatives, and proposes that Darfuris vote by 2010 on whether to create a single entity out of its three states. The AU has 7,000 peacekeepers in Darfur.

The draft calls for the president to include a rebel-nominated Darfur official, among his top advisers, with “all the attributes of a vice-president, except the name,” Salim said, noting the constitution, under the treaty ending the north-south war, permits two vice-presidents.

Yesterday marked the first day of the World Food Program’s cut in food rations by half for about 3 million refugees in Darfur because of a shortage of money. U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick is expected to arrive in Nigeria’s capital today, in a bid to break the talks’ stalemate. Washington calls the Darfur violence “genocide.”

The Sudan has already accepted the loss of its Christian/Animist South; losing the black West is inevitable.

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Posted by orrinj

DAMNED IF WE DO, DAMNED IF WE DON'T, SO LET'S:

May 1, 2006

Aid to Sudan, though hefty, leaves gaps: The US leads countries in assistance, but the UN says it has to cut back food rations (Howard LaFranchi , 5/02/06, The Christian Science Monitor)

True, the United States has been out ahead of other world powers in pressing the parties in the peace talks and approving billions of dollars in aid, but many activists and some experts believe the US has not put its full weight behind the Darfur struggle.

So even though we’ve been the only ones — other than the African Union — doing anything useful, we’re to blame because the situation isn’t resolved yet? Aren’t these the same folks who thought e;leven years was too quick to end Saddam’s genocide?

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Posted by orrinj

May 1, 2006

Bookviews (Alan Caruba, May 2006)

In a world of many international organizations and treaties, the issue of American sovereignty was never more important. That’s why Redefining Sovereignty, edited by Orrin C. Judd, ($29.95, Smith and Kraus, Lyme, New Hampshire) is an important book. It raises the question of whether liberal democracies will continue to determine their own laws and public policies or yield these rights to transnational entities in search of universal order and justice. Essays and opinions that represent both the Left and the Right allow the reader to come to their own opinion.

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Posted by orrinj

JACKSONIANISM IS COLOR BLIND:

May 1, 2006

Divisions Cast Aside in Cry for Darfur: Mall Rally Highlights Growing Concern (Sudarsan Raghavan, May 1, 2006, Washington Post)

Clutching signs that read “Never Again,” thousands of protesters from across religious and political divides descended on the Mall yesterday along with celebrities and politicians to urge President Bush to take stronger measures to end the violence in Sudan’s Darfur region that the United States has labeled genocide.

They wore skullcaps, turbans, headscarves, yarmulkes, baseball hats and bandanas. There were pastors, rabbis, imams, youths from churches and youths from synagogues. They cried out phrases in Arabic and held signs in Hebrew. But on this day, they said, they didn’t come out as Jews or Muslims, Christians or Sikhs, Republicans or Democrats.

They came out as one, they said, to demand that the Bush administration place additional sanctions on Sudan and push harder for a multinational peacekeeping force to be sent to Darfur.

They’re all just Americans and that means advocating a unilateral moralist crusade in some country whose only offense is not having the regime or respect for human rights that we require of them.

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Posted by orrinj

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